Popular iPad design app Procreate is coming out against generative AI, and has vowed never to introduce generative AI features into its products. The company said on its website that although machine learning is a “compelling technology with a lot of merit,” the current path that generative AI is on is wrong for its platform.
Procreate goes on to say that it’s not chasing a technology that is a threat to human creativity, even though this may make the company “seem at risk of being left behind.”
Procreate CEO James Cuda released an even stronger statement against the technology in a video posted to X on Monday.
I’ve no idea where you’re getting these predictions from. I think some of them are fundamentally flawed, if not outright incorrect, and don’t reflect real life trends of generative AI development and applications.
Gonna finish this comment in a few, please wait. Edit: there we go.
One by one, somewhat sorted from “Ok, I see it,” to “What the hell?”
Wall of text
It’s arguably already ruining many artists’ lives, yeah. I haven’t seen any confirmed mass layoffs in the game industry due to AI just yet. Some articles claimed that Rayark, developer of Deemo and Cytus, fired many of its artists, but they later denied this.
Maybe. If you’re talking AI in general, it’s already been doing so for a long time. Generative AI? Not more so than most other industries, and that’s less than you’d expect.
I doubt such dramatic statements will turn true in time, unless you’re very generous with how openly they can be interpreted.
There’s a bit to unpack, here.
That’s quite the bold statement. On some aspects, I’d be willing to hear you out, but on all metrics? That’s no longer a problem of mere technology or scale, it’s a matter of how many resources each one has available. Some gaps cannot be bridged, even by miraculous tech. For example, indies do not have the budget to license expensive actors (e.g. Call of Duty, Cyberpunk 2077), brands (e.g. racing games), and so on. GenAI will not change this. Hell, GenAI will certainly not pay for global advertising.
Whoa, whoa, slow down, please.
Generative AI is failing to deliver significant gains to most industries. This article does a wonderful job of showing that GenAI is actually quite limited in its applications, and its benefits much smaller than a lot of people think. More importantly, it highlights how the market itself is widely starting to grasp this.
Game development can’t be simplified like this! Famously, the designers and artists for genre-defining game Dark Souls were given a lot of freedom in production at the request of director Hidetaka Miyazaki himself. Regardless of what you think of the results, including the diversity of other’s visions… was the director’s vision!
Again, that’s assuming a lot and simplifying too much. I know companies that reduced their employee count, where what happened instead is that those capable of playing office politics remained, while workers who just diligently did their part got the boot. I’m not saying that’s what always happens! But none of us can accurately predict exactly how large organizations will behave solely based on employee count.
I admit, this is just a nitpick, but I don’t like the way this is phrased. Designers still have their wisdom, artists are still creative, workers remain skilled. If hiring them is no longer advantageous due to financial incentives to adopt AI, that’s not their fault for being insufficiently creative.
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That’s a fair assessment. I’m still not sure if popular AI tech is on an exponential or a sigmoid curve, though I tend towards the latter. But the industry at large is starting to believe it’s just not worth it. Worse, the entities at the forefront of AI are unsustainable—they’re burning brightly right now, but the cash flow required to keep a reaction on this scale going is simply too large. If you’ve got time and are willing, please check the linked article by Ed (burst damage).
My bad, I try to trim down the fat while editing, but I accidentally removed things I shouldn’t. As I said, it’s a nitpick, and I understand the importance of helping those who find themselves unhirable. Maybe it’s just me, but I thought it came across a little mean, even if it wasn’t your intent. I try to gently “poke” folks when I see stuff like this because artists get enough undeserved crap already.
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What evidence is there that gen AI hasn’t peaked? They’ve already scraped most of the public Internet to get what we have right now, what else is there to feed it? The AI companies are also running out of time–VCs are only willing to throw money at them for so long, and given the rate of expenditure on AI so far outpaces pretty much every other major project in human history, they’re going to want a return on investment sooner rather than later. If they were making significant progress on a model that could do the things you were saying, they would be talking about it so that they could buy time and funding from VCs. Instead, we’re getting vague platitudes about “AGI” and meaningless AI sentience charts.