CEO James Cuda
the irony
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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I don't trust them. They better fire him and hire a Jim Abacus.
The CEO should ideally have the exact same name as the company. Like Tim Apple.
Or Sam Sung.
Doug Bowser of Nintendo springs to mind. Also Gary Bowser, the guy they used the US courts to make an example of.
Is that what he was saying in Mario 64? "So long, Gary Bowser!"
The more you buy, the more you save!
As with everything the problem is not AI technology the problem is capitalism.
End capitalism and suddenly being able to share and openly use everyone's work for free becomes a beautiful thing.
I agree, but as long as we still have capitalism I support measures that at least slow down the destructiveness of capitalism. AI is like a new powertool in capitalism's arsenal to dismantle our humanity. Sure we can use it for cool things as well. But right now it's used mostly to automate stuff that makes us human - art, music and so on. Not useful stuff like loading the dishwasher for me. More like writing a letter for me to invite my friends to my birthday. Very cool. But maybe the work I put in doing this myself is making my friends feel appreciated?
Edit: It's also nice to at least have an app that takes this maximalist approach. Then people can choose. If they're half-assing it there will be more and more ai-features creeping in over time. One compromise after the next until it's like all the other apps. It's also important to have such a maximalist stand in order to gauge the scale in a way.
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Procreate is amazing. I bought it for my neurodivergent daughter and used it as a non-destructive coloring book.
I’d grab a line drawing of a character that she wanted to color from a google image search, add it to the background layer, lock the background so she can’t accidentally move or erase it, then have her color on the layer above it using the multiply so the black lines can’t be painted over. She got the point where she prefers to have the colorized version alongside the black and white so she can grab the colors from the original and do fun stuff like mimic its shading and copy paste in elements that might have been too difficult for her to render. Honestly, she barely speaks but on that program, she’s better than most adults already even at age 8. Her work looks utterly perfect and she knows a lot of advanced blending and cloning stuff that traditional media artists don’t usually know.
That's heartwarming. Good luck to her! (and you)
You're a great techno-parent
Thanks. I try my best. 😊
No doubt his decision was helped by the fact that you can't really fit full image generation AI on iPads - for example Stable Diffusion needs at the very least 6GB of GPU memory to work.
That said, since what they sell is a design app, I applaud him for siding with the interests of at least some of his users.
PS: Is it just me that finds it funny that the guy's last name is "Cuda" and CUDA is the Nvidia technology for running computing on their GPUs and hence widelly used for this kind of AI?
you can't really fit full image generation AI on iPads - for example Stable Diffusion needs at the very least 6GB of GPU memory to work.
You can currently run Stable Diffusion and Flux on iPads and iPhones with the Draw Things app. Including LoRAs and TIs and ControlNet and a whole bunch of other options I'm too green to understand.
Technically the app even runs on relatively old devices, though I imagine only at lower resolutions and probably takes ages.
But in my limited experience it works quite well on an iPad Pro and an iPhone 13 Pro.
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While a honorable move, "never" doesn't exist in a world based on quarterly financials...
Wow, I'm actually kinda impressed. I'm not sure I'm 100% behind their stance, but it's better than companies that blindly chase profits.
Tbh I think generative AI can be used creatively and artistically, but knowing how to use generative AI doesn't automatically make you creative or artistic. It's like making someone paint a picture for you. Just making someone paint a picture for you doesn't make you an artist, but an artist could say something by making someone paint for them. To put it another way, the AI element has to be more than just a means to an end; it has to justify itself somehow.
"But normal artists don't have to justify themselves!"
You're right! That's because it's assumed that the amount of time, effort and practice that is required to create art "manually" leads to the artist thinking deeply about their artwork before and during its creation; and 99% of the time, that's completely true (the other 1% is "eye candy" like Kinkade; which is what AI is 99% of the time). Most people don't understand this because they have never truly attempted to make "art", however artists obsess over the details. You think that red truck in the bottom corner was "just there"? No, the artist probably put it there for a reason. Hell, the truck being red likely has a reason behind it. Maybe the artist wanted to say something about red trucks, or maybe the truck just looked better in red. Either way, that was a decision the artist was required to make.
That said, AI can do some really cool stuff that would take humans years to reproduce, or would be extremely tedious and mind-numbing. A good example I recently came across is using AI to split music into stems or even into individual instruments. This makes it a lot easier for DJs, musicians and producers to get clean samples. It also makes it significantly easier for people to make custom tracks for Fuser (that's how I found out about it).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't think they should write-off AI entirely, but instead try and think of areas where AI would help artists. Maybe you use it to allow people to rescale their artwork without potentially having to redraw blurry lines. Maybe it's AI that's designed to separate photographs into individual pieces for the purpose of collages. Maybe it's an AI designed to interpolate animation frames better than human-written algorithms. AI can do a lot of stuff other than just making eye candy.
That said, I think rejecting generative AI entirely is better than blindly chasing the money, so good on you.
They're chasing profit too, though. "Taking a stand" means they're advertising, trying to differentiate themselves from their competitors and draw in people who hold anti-AI views.
That will last until that segment of users becomes too small to be worth trying to base their business on.
Well, sounds great. I almost wish more companies would advertise to that market, really.
It's like... I know you're lying, and I know you probably don't actually care, but some of your competitors couldn't even be bothered to do this much. Those companies thought shitting on things I care about to maximize profit was the better strategy. I'll take that into consideration in my future decisions.
And if the situation changes, if they turn around and go full in on generative AI, we'll just have to consider that too. That's life.
Of course, I believe using alternatives that are more resistant to these kinds of market trends (community built software, perhaps?) would be ideal, but it's not always an option.
They specifically called out generative AI though. Stuff like separating photographs to individual pieces doesn't require generative AI specifically. Machine learning models that fall into the general umbrella of AI already exist for object segmentation.
Generative AI steals art.
Procreate's customers are artists.
Stands to reason you don't piss your customer base off.
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Never eh? Well someone won’t exist under the same name/promise in decade or two.
Ironically, I think AI may prove to be most useful in video games.
Not to outright replace writers, but so they instead focus on feeding backstory to AI so it essentially becomes the characters they’ve created.
I just think it’s going to be inevitable and the only possible option for a game where the player truly chooses the story.
I just can’t be interested in multiple choice games where you know that your choice doesn’t matter. If a character dies from option a, then option b, c, and d kill them as well.
Realising that as a kid instantly ruined telltale games for me, but I think AI used in the right way could solve that problem, to at least some degree.
Honestly, I think that...
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AI is going to revolutionize the game industry.
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AI is going to kill the game industry as it currently exists.
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Generative AI will lead to a lot of real-time effects and mechanics that are currently impossible, like endless quests that don't feel hollow, realistic procedural generation that can convincingly create everything from random clutter to entire galaxies, true photorealistic graphics (look up gaussian splatting, it's pretty cool), convincing real-time art filters (imagine a 3d game that looks like an animated Van Gogh painting), and so on.
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Generative AI is going to result in a hell of a lot of layoffs and will likely ruin people's lives.
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Generative AI will eventually open the door to small groups of devs being able to compete with AAA releases on all metrics.
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Generative AI will make studios with thousands of employees obsolete. This is a double-edged sword. Fewer employees means fewer ideas; but on the other side, you get a more accurate vision of what the director originally intended. Fewer employees also will also mean that you will likely have to be a genuinely creative person to get ahead, instead of someone who knows how to use Maya or Photoshop but is otherwise creatively bankrupt. Your contribution matters far more in a studio of <50 than it does in a studio of >5,000; as such, your creative skill will matter more.
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A lot of people will have to be retrained because they will no longer be creative enough to make a living off of making games.
Tbh, I think game development is one of the few places that generative AI will actually have a significant benefit; however I also think it will completely scramble the industry once it starts being widely adopted, and it'll be a long time before the dust settles.
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Yeah, ultimately a lof of devs are trying to make "story generators" relying on the user's imagination to fill in the blanks, hence rimworld is so popular.
There's a business/technical model where "local" llms would kinda work for this too, if you set it up like the Kobold Horde. So the dev hosts a few GPU instances for GPUs that can't handle the local LLM, but users with beefy PCs also generate responses for other users (optionally, with a low priority) in a self hosted horde.
Something like using a LLM to make actually unique side quests in a Skyrim-esque game could be interesting.
The side quest/bounty quest shit in something like Starfield was fucking awful because it was like, 5 of the same damn things. Something capable of making at least unique sounding quests would be a shockingly good use of the tech.
That stance will change if they ever get acquired. Might even get the chance to see James Cuda try and walk back this stance in a few years.
So definitely gonna have AI baked in by next year.
Very good news for artists. AI image generation is founded upon art theft, and art theft is something that artists are not fond of, so it's really nice to see the developer being open about his respect to the artists who use the app!
Didn't krita say the same thing at one time?
It's currently one of the best programs to generate AI art using self hosted models.
I think that's kinda comparing apples to oranges. Krita is FOSS, and FOSS developers can be just as affected by community pressure as proprietary developers; possibly moreso. I dunno the circumstances around Krita's decision to walk back and include AI, but I speculate it may have come from community pressure. Procreate isn't FOSS so the community has a much harder time forcing their hand (the community can't exactly fork the code and push everyone to migrate to a pro-AI version of Procreate). The other side of this, however, is that as proprietary developers, they feel more pressure from money.
My prediction is that they'll stick to this as long as it's profitable. If they break away from it then it's either because the CEO was replaced with a more profit-hungry CEO, they're no longer profitable and they believe adding AI would fix that, or they believe they've found a use for AI that wouldn't sacrifice creativity.
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