Popular iPad design app Procreate is saying no to generative AI, and has vowed to never introduce generative AI features into its product.

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.

  • @AceticonEnglish
    45•4 months ago

    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?

    • @MashedTechEnglish
      46•4 months ago

      They’re all run on cloud, for commercial products.

      • @AceticonEnglish
        2•4 months ago

        Good point, I had forgotten that :/

    • TheRealKuniEnglish
      10•4 months ago

      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.

        • TheRealKuniEnglish
          3•4 months ago

          Honestly most of what I’ve learned about how to use SD comes from seeing what other people have done and trying to tweak or adjust to get a feel for the tool and its various models. Spend some time on a site like CivitAI to both see what can be done and to find models. I’m very much a noob and cannot produce results nearly as impressive as a good chunk of what I find on there.

          The most important thing I’ve learned is how much generative AI, especially SD, is just a tool. And people with more creativity and a better understanding of the tool use it better, just like every other tool.

          I do like the idea of using it in GIMP as an answer to Adobe’s Firefly.