People aren't looking at this from a business perspective. Right now a decent subset of artists hate AI, so it makes sense to try and target that market if it's large enough.
If artists suddenly started loving AI tomorrow, this pledge would be out the window. It's just business and marketing - nothing more, nothing less.
A non-publicly traded company doesn't have to strictly adhere to the bottom line. If they have steady cash flow, and the people running the company have a strong stance on AI, why would they have to change? Their app is fantastic, and if someone wants to add AI slop to their Procreate workflow they can just import/export from/to an AI slop app.
It’s a good rule of thumb that the profit motive will make everything worse, but it’s not like it happens 100% of the time with no exceptions (unless publicly traded)
But the people who use a tool like this aren't doing "slop" in the fist place, any more than they're importing the first stock art matching a keyword and calling it a day.
The stuff that gets the flak — I've seen some on posters in the U-bahn here, with a man exiting an airport luggage scanner while a robot scans his belly to reveal he's pregnant with a cat — are done by people with IMO no artistic standards to understand why editing is needed.
> I've seen some on posters in the U-bahn here, with a man exiting an airport luggage scanner while a robot scans his belly to reveal he's pregnant with a cat
The prompt here sounds like something a generative AI tool would struggle to make look poster-worthy, while also being something I'd expect flesh-and-blood artists in marketing to come up with, draw, and think it's a good idea.
This is to say, I can tell (bad) AI art from human art by a type of technical mistakes made, but not by absurdity of the depicted concept.
If Procreate wanted to maximize revenue they'd have switched to a subscription model way back instead of one time payment. I know it's hard to believe but some people are not making all decisions from a business perspective
Artists are increasingly souring on Photoshop and looking for alternatives in response to the increasing presence of generative AI in it, so in some capacity, yes it is.
As usual, the answer is complex and depends on degree, and the element of honesty in the artistic work. There were dishonest works before AI, but it makes it much easier.
I don't know a single artist that's doing commercial work that isn't using AI to speed up their delivery times. They're all using AI tooling because it's useful.
I know this because they've all reached out to me at one point or another and asked about tools/hardware/services/etc, and I've done my best to point them in the right direction. One that I'm particularly proud of bought himself a 3090 and is running his own models and doing inpainting stuff to great effect.
> I don't know a single artist that's doing commercial work that isn't using AI to speed up their delivery times. They're all using AI tooling because it's useful.
I am a professional photographer and writer. I am 100% AI-free: I don't use any generative AI for my writing, photography, or graphic design (I do some of that as well). I absolutely hate AI and want no part of it.
All of my friends working in professional photography and publishing are heavily using AI, both the features integrated by Adobe into Photoshop and Midjourney. They use computers in their work, but they are not programmers - they are what you would describe as standard creatives.
All the actual creative people I know don't care what other people are doing. What other people are doing is usually a sign of what not to do if you want to be creative.
"Creatives" so strongly against AI art I suspect are not creative at all. They are the same class of people who are so uncreative that the entire internet looks almost exactly the same, even though you could basically do anything.
We don't call the person on the Ikea furniture assembly line "creative".
With that said, I am bored to tears with the output of generative AI art on its own. It is like taking a 4 bar beat sample generator for music and looping the output 100 times creates a pretty boring song. Someone actual creative though can see that the beat sample generator can be used for the base material for something interesting musically.
Of course the creative fraud is going to be afraid of something new and happy if things stay uncreative and the same.
> All the actual creative people I know don't care what other people are doing. What other people are doing is usually a sign of what not to do if you want to be creative.
One of them showed a situation where the client wanted a complex object removed from the background. I've done some Photoshop in the past and understood why that would have taken hours. He then demoed an AI feature that did the job in a few clicks. The client was happy and he moved on to another task... Hard to argue against that.
Not really. Sociologically, I think it's a bad thing to want so desperately to remove stuff. That desperation was already borne from previous technologies, so it's just technology making things worse by apparently solving a previous problem that was already created by technology that ushered in a spirit paving the way for AI.
Or all my friends in that space are more technically minded than average. Sampling bias is implied. We're on hackernews afterall, normies don't really come here.
That's why I was clear about "my" friends, which necessarily limits the scope of what I'm saying.
> That's why I was clear about "my" friends, which necessarily limits the scope of what I'm saying.
This post:
>I don't know a single artist that's doing commercial work that isn't using AI to speed up their delivery times. They're all using AI tooling because it's useful.
I know this because they've all reached out to me at one point or another and asked about tools/hardware/services/etc, and I've done my best to point them in the right direction. One that I'm particularly proud of bought himself a 3090 and is running his own models and doing inpainting stuff to great effect.
Does not include the phrase “my friends”. The first sentence could be interpreted as a broad statement as well.
I went to an art school so a lot of my friends are artist of various mediums and some use A.I. for fun and profit and I haven’t seen any of them say negative things about it. I feel like the artist who hate A.I. now are modern day luddites.
It’s just a tool, adapt or get left behind. I wonder if this is how painters felt when photography became accessible to the massess.
People just notice the shittiest ones where some marketdrone uses Dall-E to create the most stereotypical shit and puts it on a massive billboard or poster with zero thought for anything.
With local models + local learning, you can create stuff that looks like the company's IP and use it as a jumping off point or for inspiration.
I don't think they disagree with not adding AI features. I think they disagree with the moral posturing. It would have been different if the devs simply said "We aren't adding AI features since we don't think it's actually that useful."
I find it slightly annoying and dishonest to present it as a moral position, but overall it's nothing that other businesses haven't already been doing. It's just not a big deal.
AI is not "stealing content" and it is not immoral.
This is literally the same line from record companies and Hollywood during the 80s and 90s, and they were rightfully mocked then. It is baffling how so many people are just repeating it now.
I've noticed the same. I think the actual reason behind is similar in both cases, something like "this is theft because it means I won't get paid" — which isn't really how that works but also explains Musk's X advertising lawsuit.
Like your respondant, I find the artists more sympathetic despite finding the argument itself bad.
I don't know if "theft because I'm not getting paid" describes artists' sentiment so much as "theft because someone else is making money on a tool that's 'using' my work/labor". Which I still think is an argument that requires opening a Pandora's box of IP law that should not be opened (because in the long run it won't benefit non-corporate artists anyway), but...
In general, I think the coming replacement of many jobs is a serious issue for society and one that deserves serious attention.
That said, the intellectually dishonest arguments irk me to no end and I'm simply tired of them. The artists upset over AI are more sympathetic than the RIAA (It's really quite hard not to be), but this stuff really wears at my sympathy.
And, unfortunately, it's impossible to actually tackle any issues unless without moving past the bad arguments.
> That said, the intellectually dishonest arguments irk me to no end and I'm simply tired of them.
I, too, get annoyed by People Who Are Wrong On The Internet; I'm trying to become more stoic, as I don't want to end up like my father.
I don't know if this will pass, or if the pro/anti AI split is going to be as permanent as the economic left/right split, or the libertarian/authoratarian split.
> This is literally the same line from record companies and Hollywood during the 80s and 90s, and they were rightfully mocked then. It is baffling how so many people are just repeating it now.
The difference with AI is that AI takes a 100% bit for bit copy and uses it, rather than humans who just use their impression to be inspired.
Yes, illustrators are notorious IP rentiers like the Hollywood studios and the RIAA. It’s the tech billionaires that are the victims of their vile, unjust monopoly tactics. These are coherent thoughts that demonstrate why it’s a good idea to argue from analogies.
I'm not praising tech billionaires, nor am I attacking RIAA/Hollywood or online artists as entities. Please don't start crafting strawmen. I'm criticizing the "stealing" argument because I don't find it logically sound; it doesn't matter who's saying it.
I am still more than willing to have a civil debate around the argument itself.
Why is it stealing to analyze images? I would be more convinced if AI used a fixed database during generation, or if it was considered a standard, acceptable practice to reproduce training data as "new" generations.
You don’t find the stealing argument logically sound because you immediately frame the theft as “analyzing” to suit your own narrative and then demand people engage with it, while proceeding to make further spurious claims like…
> I would be more convinced if AI used a fixed database during generation
Wow, I didn’t know that model weights, an elaborately compressed form of their training data, rewrote themselves every time they were invoked. Or that it’s only theft if I stole data from a fixed database to build my own service.
AI training is literally analyzing. That is how it works. Properly trained models (i.e., ones that aren't overparameterized or overfit) do not just "elaborately compress" training data as this is not possible. For example, you cannot compress 1 billion images into 1 billion parameters, and expect to retrieve them later.
If objective facts are "my own narrative", then no rational discussion can occur.
You absolutely can compress a subset of a billion images into a billion parameters if you throw out all but a thousand. Is it no longer copyright infringement if you also run enough irrelevant data through your algorithm alongside the images you’re stealing?
Don’t mind me, I’m just going to ‘analyse’ this UHD movie and produce a 480p video file in a different codec whose bits are almost entirely unlike those in the original and throws out almost all the information from the original. I’ll put it on a RAID array with thousands of others, mangling the bits of the ‘analysis’ even further. The right ‘prompt’ may cause the model to produce some imagery very similar to some of its ‘training data’ however.
You can use whatever weasel words you want, but bits go in and fewer derivative bits come out in both cases.
You’re right, purpose and intent matters, and the intent is to profit from the work of others without their permission and without crediting or compensating them in any way.
It has to do with what the resulting model is used for. It gets particularly dodgy if its commercial usage, because most if not all of the data used for training wasn’t licensed for that, making for a “laundering” effect.
Though I also think there’s an argument to be made that images need to be properly licensed to even be “analyzed” in this way, because it’s ultimately an unauthorized copy even if it involves picking the image apart and obfuscation. They were published with the intent of being viewed by the public, not for being reproduced in any shape or form.
It’s not baffling at all if you consider the point of copyright in the first place. That is, to promote the progress of useful arts and sciences. One does, and one does not.
Yup. Generative AI is the useful part of "useful arts and sciences". 99%+ of content that goes into training those models is, on its own, useless and worthless, and the greatest value by far it can bring to society is to be part of the training dataset. That also applies to art that may have had some value when published, but now languishes in obscurity - AI is giving it a second life, a way to benefit society far more than originally did.
So yeah, if we're going by the (idealized version of) intent of copyright, it stands strongly on the side of AI.
EDIT:
And before someone complains that SOTA models are trained and owned by private parties -- copyright is "promoting the progress of useful arts and sciences" by literally giving private parties a monopoly to make money off art as an incentive.
> By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself. [audience laughs and claps] ... there's no rationalization for what you do and you are Satan's little helpers, okay? Kill yourself, seriously. You're the ruiner of all things good, seriously. ...
> I know all the marketing people are going, "he's doing a joke..." there's no joke here whatsoever. ... I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, "Oh, you know what Bill's doing, he's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart." [audience laughs] Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking evil scumbags.
> "Ooh, you know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar. That's a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We've done research. Huge market. He's doing a good thing." Goddammit, I'm not doing that, you scumbags. Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!
> "Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market. Bill's very bright to do that." God, I'm just caught in a fucking web.
> The announcement has already attracted widespread praise from creatives online
I love how the evidence for this is three tweets from Internet randos. I’m sure I can also find three tweets condemning this from “creatives online” in no time at all; if not I’ll just post it myself.
Why do we need these useless “‘many’ twitter users liked blah” news, again? Just tell me “blah happened” and stop there.
> “Widespread” is quite the weasel word. I have no idea what criteria the author used to justify using it.
Well, there's a huge backlash against generative AI amongst creatives. At least amongst many pro photographers and illustrators. Check the Krita forum also. It may not be formally documented but many people hate generative AI. I am a pro photographer and hate it immensely.
Many people I know of hate AI as well. I work for one of the largest independent photography sites on the net (Photography Life) and all of us dislike AI and have even put "AI-free" in our logo. Many of us want AI to die.
and furthermore: this kind of reaction was very likely in the first place.
there seems to be a strong sentiment against ai among some artists. and so it's to be expected that some of these would publish posts on their social media displaying agreement.
Good. If your customers vehemently don't want the feature in your product (with the exception of maybe security/privacy features), don't add it.
If you still really want to make that feature, make it a plugin or application that is completely separate so that people who want it can use and people who don't can pretend it does not exist and never even have to look at it or think about it.
The band Queen had a prominent note, "No Synthesizers!", on the sleeve of all of their albums from Queen II through A Day At The Races. Presumably it was good branding to emphasize that they were an authentic rock band. By the 80's, however, the initial synthesizer backlash had worn off, and the technology had improved to the point that they were a universal piece of studio equipment...and one that Queen used heavily in their later albums.
It seems likely that acceptance of AI technology will follow a similar pattern.
What makes you think that AI art generators getting "better" (for whatever definition of better you see fit) will make them less unpopular? They're not unpopular because they give poor quality output.
Calling current AI output “quality” belies a limited understanding of the requirements people have of generated images.
The technology in its current state just has no practical relevance outside of a narrow slice of the most low-requirement image needs. Stock photos for blog thumbnails, Kinkade-ian “whatever the tasteless client wants to pay for” slop (minus any claim to distinct style), plus a certain class of fungible Photoshop tasks (change the color, remove the object, and some subset of photobashing).
It lacks the consistency and fine-grained control to support works where the primary goals include artistic expression - you cannot express what you cannot specify. Or worse, prompters don’t even realize how many artistic decisions they’ve delegated to noise.
The same limitations also prevent it from being competitive in the most labor-intensive image-making fields where any assistance would be appreciated, like comic panels or videogame sprite sheets. Any attempt to leverage it for such tasks requires too much hand-holding, compromise, and retouching to provide a real alternative to human labor.
IMO the important sense of "better" will be good integrations - making various ML-based tools convenient and common to use as part of a workflow.
We're all biased towards morally justifying what we're already doing. Those against AI still tend to use tools like Google Translate (trained on translators' work, partially displacing their jobs) and when asked will often give reasons why it's different and other AI tools are worse; ultimately I think that's ad-hoc rationale downstream from the fact they were already using Google Translate (because it's useful and baked into their browser) rather than it being reasoning that they actually used to determine whether to use Google Translate and which would need addressing for other ML tools to become accepted.
If someone starts using, say initially, ML-based background removal and upscaling as part of their workflow (because it's demonstrably useful and easily accessible in their editor), I think they'd equally start justifying that.
Interesting to contrast this with the attitude many photographers have to Topaz Labs. That thing makes out of whole cloth 90% of image data, and the model doing it is trained on who knows what, yet the result is "I sharpened my photos in post using topaz".
Similar with using gen AI inpainting for object removal. It's all "post" for many photographers.
Yet for artists using gen ai for background, detailing or something similar is a dark side.
Generative AI changed the market. It's impossible to find someone decent now among the generative AI users who churn out stuff which is absolutely objectively shite. I've got a small network of people who I know who don't use it fortunately and they are being screwed as well because they can't compete even though their work is at least two orders of magnitude better quality.
The worst bit is the generative AI users push the same perspective which is unique and bespoke service from individual designers. You don't know it's generative AI until the paid for samples turn up.
It's a disaster. A race to the bottom. Factory farmed content.
My wife’s a graphic designer and now creative director. She uses Dall-E for all sorts of stuff. Our wedding, interior design, logo for our other company, fixing up our photographs. Her work as an illustrator has been on the front of the NYSE, and on Muni buses, and up here in our home.
So, sure, there are lots of people who hate diffusion models but there are lots of people who enjoy working with them too. Online spaces attract the hate, but I have to say that the tools are good!
timing is everything when posting. 9PM EST isnt the best time to post either, but it's better than 10AM when people are just arriving at work (or heading to work the further west you go).
(This will lead nowhere..) but hearing someone claim theft, which is a well defined term, usually involving physically taking something from someone is so much of a statement like confused billionaires claiming a "woke mind virus".
Have we left the ability behind to make informed discussions?
You'd think it would too since apple openly advertises how good the newer hardware is at AI. No idea where the above user got the idea that they had no ability to do that.
AI wouldn't help their app in the slightest. Taking an anti "AI" stance aligns with their business. It's a perfectly rational decision. Now, that doesn't take anything away from being a heartfelt decision, too.
Bold of you to assume hating AI isn't the "Current Thing" among online artists.
Blind decisionmaking is bad. It's perfectly fine if Procreate devs don't want to add AI features. I simply find it distasteful to present it as a moral position (as people are wont to do with so many things nowadays) or groundbreaking perspective. It's a preference - which should be respected - but just a preference.
These people are so sure they occupy the moral high ground, but they do not. If the trend continues it will be possible for anyone to materialize their artistic vision with great fidelity. I’m sure there are countless people who would have contributed culturally significant works in the past but for a lack of time or money or peculiar talents requisite for the physical production of such works.
At the core of most objections to generative art is some combination of mercantile fear, distress at sunk costs, or the loss of one’s specialness. While all are understandable, a righteous person would weigh their own loss against society’s gain, and finding the balance so lopsidedly in favor of society, make of themselves a sacrifice.
>it will be possible for anyone to materialize their artistic vision with great fidelity
This has already been possible for such a long time, and with the advent of internet the amount of free and easily accessible learning resources has grown massively. All you need to do is put in the effort to learn. As for money, pen and paper is less expensive than most computer hardware, i think.
It's weird how in most fields not having 'talent' (whatever that is even supposed to mean) is not considered a valid excuse for not going through the effort of learning but for some reason when it comes to art, it gets a pass.
> It's weird how in most fields not having 'talent' (whatever that is even supposed to mean) is not considered a valid excuse for not going through the effort of learning but for some reason when it comes to art, it gets a pass.
Oh but you don’t understand the grand conspiracy of the privileged artist class who use their talent they were unfairly born with to gatekeep access to art and drive up prices on their labor. AI companies who ingest their works as part of their supply chain are simply democratizing it so the rest of us can enjoy it. For a small fee of course, to redistribute artists' obscene wealth into the hands of the struggling AI corporations (public services are not free). And the vision can become real, where people with excellent visual taste but no birth talent, can finally attach a cyberpunk-robot-holding-the-earth concept art into their LLM generated blog posts.
Right now, viewing the AI slop slowly filling the web, it's hard to see the gain, though. It's possible things will improve, but it's just as possible that guiding the tools will take skills most people will never master, just as they never mastered the non-automated drawing tools.
I'd compare AI art to a diet of soda. It's tasty and maximal right now, but you never develop the ability to think out or work with art beyond pressing the button on the frictionless slop machine.
If artists suddenly started loving AI tomorrow, this pledge would be out the window. It's just business and marketing - nothing more, nothing less.