iPads can be a bit more ergonomic than Cintiqs, but if you can deal with the pen-screen disconnect then classic non-screen tablets are significantly more ergonomic than either, on top of being significantly cheaper. YMMV though, some people need that pen-screen connection.
For me, Procreate is the killer app that made me want an iPad and my 7 year old iPad Pro is my favorite computer.
I can't believe it's only $13 (I think I paid $10 many years ago). It's one of those rare apps that I wish was more expensive because a $13 purchase doesn't feel sustainable.
I should probably sign up for a Procreate course. The app is so deep that I know I'm only using the most basic features. If anybody has books or courses to recommend, I'm all ears.
Well, people who make a lot of money, do so, by selling lots of cheap, as opposed to few expensive, and I think that Procreate may be one of the best-selling apps ever.
I remember Corel Painter. It was about $400, and did many similar things.
The marginal cost of selling software is so small that with enough customers, almost any price is sustainable. They are estimated to earn $2M/month from this app [1], which should be more than enough to cover their costs. 150k new customers per month is pretty incredible, when you think about it.
About the same. The 120Hz on the pro feels very slightly better and has slightly lower latency. This does help a tiny bit for detail work. But you get used to not having it after about 30 mins.
You will probably be very happy with the Air. I'd recommend the big one.
I use a 2018 13" iPad Pro and I love that size because it's basically the same size as a sheet of 8.5x11 (or A4) paper. It's the perfect size for reading and marking up PDFs too.
Last year I bought and returned the M4 iPad Pro because they didn't make a Smart Keyboard Folio for it which I prefer to the more heavy duty Magic Keyboard. So I'm still using my 7 year old iPad worrying about what I'm going to do when it dies. I thought for sure somebody would make a knock off, but nobody has made anything that I think is as good as the Apple product.
For me, Procreate and GoodNotes are a killer combination that justify owning the device.
Making a screen tablet is really hard. The iPad is general-purpose enough (and does not require a stylus) to make it worth the effort (and price -they ain't cheap), but a specialized one would likely fizzle, due to a limited customer base.
I keep wondering. Is there even a decent FOSS tablet (as opposed to desktop) environment? There are plenty of reasons why iPads and Macs have vastly different UIs. KDE seems strictly desktop-focused. Gnome seems to be pulling in both directions, but a considerable amount of functionality is only accessible thru crammed menus and buttons.
What about the apps? I've heard really good things about Krita, but what's the killer app?
There are movements towards making these. It's an integrated SW+HW stack problem and Apple has had years of leadership on that space. Times are changing.
What you would see in the past are "PC or Android with a tablet manufacturer's sticker on it". Wacom has a history of occasionally licensing their stuff for a laptop. And XPPen, for example, has made a few in the "Magic Drawing Pad" series now and they needed a few iterations to move away from being a generic OSI tablet to actually using their digitizer tech. These products don't excite tech enthusiasts - a fully integrated device, as opposed to screen and digitizer, comes with more concerns about all-round performance and value - and so far, the premium on them makes them compete with iPads. But there is tremendous demand for it - seemingly every "art kid" sees an iPad and Procreate as a milestone, because that combination is what the content creators they watch are using.
Are they? The iPad is in it's 15th year now. Apple has shown exactly what needs to be done yet there isn't enough interest in the open source community to develop (or sponsor development of) a solution. I don't see much evidence of change.
> because that combination is what the content creators they watch are using
But also because it's the best hardware and software and can be relatively inexpensive, especially if you are willing to buy used.
I had the same interpretation and in fact there's some truth in it. I recently did procreate and realized how primitive AI is compared to human beings and how long it might take for it to catch up.
The rate of learning for infants is rapid, but unlike LLMs. Every day there are very small steps that eventually add up. The size and quantity of each step is often not that impressive, but the number of tries from first random attempt at something to consistent behaviour is impressively low.
Same. Completely forgot that there's a product with that name. I mean, it's already hard to read that name with a straight face under normal circumstances, but they've really outdone themselves with this headline.
Before the post where Procreate was positioned? I imagine it was pretty much in the same spot, it's just a good software. I'm sure the target audience is pretty happy about the post but I don't think it made a particular difference on the store.
I suspect that ubiquitously forcing people to use models that do reliably shit the bed (on coding and everything else) is an excellent way to get a real world Butlerian Jihad.
I don't think we'll go quite that far but I can easily imagine a revival of a world in which the Internet is just a box in the corner of your office, and the church, driven by AI slop everywhere.
Yeah that article was the first time I heard of the Butlerian Jihad not being used outside of the context of Dune, and as an actual thing.
And since we can talk about it without engaging with the article points, and talk about the words “Butlerian Jihad” I foresee many posts coming forth, decrying the luddites of the world
I don't know. On one hand, it's noble to see apps (CSP, Procreate, Krita) rejecting AI at this era.
On the other hand, I can't help but feel it's mental gymnastics when Krita is implementing a neutral network based linework filter [0] while very vocally being against AI. I understand the technical details, and I still fail to see the nuances here.
Well, first of all, I don't buy the idea that there is a clear line between 'filter' and 'generative' AI. Even in the example Krita dev posted [0], you can see the 'filter' AI made up a bit detail (the way the girl's eyes look became different), it's just not as smart as so-called generative AI.
And about the privacy and copyright concern, what we currently have are:
Stable Diffusion: local and offline, but not copyright-clean.
Adobe Firefly: online, but copyright-clean (if we believe Adobe's claim).
So if we combine the better sides of both, it suddenly becomes okay?
Well, there is a clear line between a handmade filter and AI. But this is clearly AI since it relies on a filter optimized via automated training on images.
I think we are in agreement, I have used more descriptive wording to just clearly indicate what I consider as a filter.
(Edit: yeah, looking at the image I can see it clearly takes some artistic liberties. Even on the dragon.)
From that post, so context is easily discoverable here (I hate Discourse navigation, Discourse is the forum platform):
"It’s not a generative AI. It won’t invent anything. It won’t add details, any stylistic flourish besides basic line weight, cross-hatching or anything else. It won’t fix any mistakes. It will closely follow the provided sketch. I believe it won’t even be possible for a network of this size and architecture to “borrow” any parts of the images from the training dataset.
We will not be training the model on any of the existing datasets, or stolen pictures. All artworks will come from artists fully aware what it’s going to be used for. And our particular model will work better with special training data anyway, I believe. Maybe you’d want to help out with gathering the artworks - I will be making another post about that soon.
The calculations will be 100% local and offline. It won’t send the sketch image to any server to process and return the line art. I’m not planning to implement any networking functionality, and there are no servers planned either. It will only use your own computer CPU and GPU for calculations, the same way all of the other features of Krita do. It also won’t train on your images that you make in Krita. It won’t save it anywhere either, until you save it with Krita to your own device as usual, in a Krita file."
This being said, I don't think this is the correct approach. I don't think you need a convolution network or training. You would need some very carefully designed filters with parameters exposed to the user. Granted, this won't do as much of a "good job" at it, but the artist will touch it up anyways.
I think emerging technologies from now on won't be judged solely by what they make possible that wasn't possible before, but under what parameters/limitations they are morally acceptable to specific markets.
(And this isn't a strictly good/bad thing to me, it's a natural byproduct of a sufficiently advanced state of technology in the future being capable of automating every last productive human activity.)
I think the top post on the Krita thread does a pretty good job at setting their boundaries. Something that cannot replace artists: it will not "beautify" art, and stays close to the input, also it should not be trained on the work of unwilling artists.
"AI" is just a tool like any other- creatives will use these tools to make things they couldn't make before because of the limits of their budget and/or scale-
I just made an original animated feature film where I sang %75 of the roles by using an AI tool(audimee.com) to convert my voice into others- I couldn't do that before- we're now creating Portuguese and Russian language versions of the songs with a tool that has a $20 usd/month subscription! Couldn't do that before!
For creatives/artists- As long as we don't use AI to generate ideas we're good, human generated ideas are a must- bring on all the AI tools!
The whole built on theft thing- as a human film director I could rattle off endless examples just in cinema of human directors "stealing" premises, sequences, shots, styles etc from other filmmakers with no consequences- so why stop the AI now?
I see the "theft" as being democratized now- large studios/entities with large resources have always been able to legally "steal" so with these AI tools I guess we all can now?
I make original animated films, games, music, art etc etc and I feel no "threat" at all from AI-
I feel the opposite as I'm excited to see what things they will allow me to do next as a micro-studio with limited budgets but unlimited creativity.
Aesthetics are dead now imo because of generative AI as anyone can be any "style" so now it is all about ideas- original human ideas.
The capabilities are interesting and useful, but the wider practical impact is that we're already being flooded with cheap cookie-cutter slop, while original artists' copyrights are completely disregarded.
If you're building tools to empower artists, this is antithetic to your mission, and simply unethical.
I do agree with the original artists work being disregarded but I think that has more to do with the aggregation and the lack of curation that is not motivated by $- as an unknown artist creating original work for 20+ years I'm optimistic about permission-less donation supported AI curators digging up unknown creative works and sharing them with humans.
A majority of which will go to already rich people.
Its a sad state now, and a sad state in the future for humanity, where technology enables and accelerates accumulation of wealth, aided and abetted by the very consumers it consumes.
Regarding "we're now creating Portuguese and Russian language versions of the songs" - have you contacted any native speakers of those languages to listen to those songs? Since the translation part isn't that hard, making it actually sound native and nice is hard.
Native speakers are the ones doing the re-writing of the lyrics in those languages. The ai tool just converts the say Russian singer voice into different voices.
> I see the "theft" as being democratized now- large studios/entities with large resources have always been able to legally "steal" so with these AI tools I guess we all can now?
You don't see any issue with machine learning models trained on huge amounts of copyrighted and patented materials basically scraped from the internet. Yes you can make your animated film and audio but at the cost of hugely controversial and non-transparent generative models.
> Aesthetics are dead now imo because of generative AI as anyone can be any "style" so now it is all about ideas- original human ideas.
This argument kind of conflicts with itself, no? Aesthetics are inferred from ideas either inspired or original.
No I don't see it as theft- in that I choose to not be a part of the formal film industry- I don't "monetize" any of my work- I have nothing that can be stolen but my aesthetics- but aesthetics are dead imo- they no longer have value- as an artist my ideas are what is valuable- and no ML/AI etc can "steal" my ideas as I haven't thought of them yet- my art and ideas are an expression of my soul- no machine will ever have a soul so I'm not threatened one bit my Ai etc
If I as an artist make a great piece of art, you don't think I should be compensated for it. If I complete a surgery or drive a truck which all of them are byproducts of ideas and knowledge I should be compensated for them, not just for thinking of them. You see the problem here? I don't want to pay for an idea of art, I want the complete and original piece made by the artist. As for if they generate the art using some machine learning model, they need to disclose that so I can make conscious choice.
Yes I do think we should be compensated for it, and we are- when we talk of compensation that usually refers to money- I'm referring to other forms of compensation-
I feel compensated on a spiritual level for my work- I do other things for money and my art can stay "pure" in a sense-
It's said that if you "sell your soul" you are unable to ever "buy it back"- so why sell it in the first place? Just so you can try to get "rich" and attempt to buy it back later because you are soulless and miserable? Doesn't make sense to me.
Maybe art is something higher? A higher cause? I was really inspired by the Rudolf Steiner book "The arts and their mission" early in my career- worth looking into if you are in the arts.
The proposition that "aesthetics is dead" because of [insert new thing here] is one of practically comical ignorance. I have never seen someone with at least a modicum of competence make it; it carries the same desperate, self-validating stench as "history is dead" or "truth is dead", etc.
The "just a tool like any other" perspective can't account for how much talentless slop is in practice created by AI.
Look at the work spotlighted by Google to promote their new Flow tool: https://x.com/GoogleLabs/status/1925596282661327073 . This is a garbage imitation of a Guy Ritchie film or a Jose Cuervo ad (maybe more the latter).
Instead of being a tool for creatives it has empowered a number of grifters to churn out more and more "content" bypassing any concern about craft and formal restrictions that help generate creative work. The work that is most often created with the help of AI is not creative, it's a bland, tasteless simulacrum of creativity.
I seriously doubt most of the money being made on this stuff is through consumption. There's a big pot of money by tech giants being used to commission and promote this kind of work to attract a user base.
For filmmakers- smart phones + cheap video cameras + free video editors + youtube monetization create what from my perspective is human made content slop. So to me slop is slop- it doesn't matter if a machine or a human "made" it. It's all slop and it all sucks haha.
Grifters will always grift- curation is what is important to sort through and ignore the slop- maybe there will be some systems with special fingerprinting algo's to "find" original human made non slop?
I regard this the same as the crypto/NFT people saying hate the practitioners not the technology. The only things people seem to do with the technology is to create more and more trash.
I think we're really missing the forest for the trees here - which is that generative AIs completely obliterate truth. Like, as a concept.
We pretty much cannot prove what's real and what's not anymore. Who knows the consequences of this. At worst, we might transform to an abysmally low-trust third-world society.
Why is that the line in the sand? And if someone did find inspiration and ideas from an AI, and made something popular with it, wouldn’t it be indistinguishable from any other piece of popular content?
Sure- as the AI is trained on the work of humans- so if someone had an idea "inspired by ai" its really just saying they were inspired by humans anyway- for me personally I'll never ask an LLM for "ideas" though-
I don't want to get into the subject right now but I have to say I love the design of that site. It's relaxing. Reminds me of Apple's site way back when.
I think this is a new paradigm shift only just getting underway within the past decade.
In the past we used to be able to look forward to the future to solve obvious limitations of technology back then. Example is how limited and expensive it was to capture photos on rolls of film. Within the past 20 years we can now take effectively unlimited photos digitally on a device that can do much more than just take photos, and that limit has been abolished forever.
It is this forever that is starting to loom on us. Most of us can't imagine a life without Facebook, smartphones, addictive feeds and the like even if we don't directly use them. It is not possible to go back to a state of life untainted by this technology. So now a fancy new technology that promises to paint your end-products for you comes out and in the span of just a few years threatens to change the whole landscape of art that has been repeated in cycles for thousands of years, forever. It is only natural that some would loudly object.
But the same wheels driving human progress that removed the limitations of the disposable camera will not slow down at the stage of generative AI either. I don't see how this would happen given our intelligence has already gotten us far in many other domains. Progress is like a wildfire that eats up dry bushes. If enough of the medium is there it will spontaneously occur and not much can be done to prevent it. Except with technology, it is not dry timber but "what ifs." "What if art doesn't have to be defined by the journey to get there, but by a satisfying end product?" "What if a computer program could replicate the motions of a paintbrush, and create art indistinguishable from a human's?" Any one of us can come up with the next "what if."
If you belive that art could be generative, think twice. Its not about how is it done. But what is a purpose of it? What is a point of make art? To express yourself? To give observers new point of view? To share experience? Also art is beyond digital pixels.
Paradigm is shifting same as first camera wad invented. Obsession with reproducing reality was abolished and shift to all kinds of *isms. Some artist (ie Mucha) used new technology for improve their creative process. Some believed, that photography stole a part of our soul that was trapped on taken picture. It repeats. Just with different technologies.
I'm honestly very interest how we, as humans, will deal with it and how paradigm evolve.
Procreate knows their target users are skilled humans, and it’s been consistently refreshing to see them align their morals and beliefs to how much AI has stolen from the creative world.
I think unless you are a creative yourself, you’ll never be able to fully grasp just how sickening it’s been to watch and see centuries of artists blood, sweat, and tears all be garbled into a slop smoothie with no credit or citation.
Any creative who enjoys AI was most likely never a creative for the right reasons to begin with.
I love the attitude, I really do. But it feels a little like the Charge of the Light Brigade. Bold, beautiful, and ultimately a devastating and inevitable loss.
It is not your future, because you have no future.
Unless, there is some sort of "great filter" for all the AI technology, it will pretty much outdo every kind of human creativity and rush into customized highly tailored generated art.
Like you click the button and now you have 43243 new games just like one you finished couple of hours ago. Oh you are bored by having so much games? Let me drip feed you. Etc. Etc.
Why? For the same reason any story floats to the top. We are clicking through to read the linked article, up voting, and (like you) participating in the discussion. Put all this stuff together, and the story will trend highly for a while.
HN doesn't have the kind of purity filter you are looking for.
You can have whatever dislike of Apple products and their walled garden that you like (I certainly don’t own an iPad myself), but at the end of the day Procreate is one of the most popular digital art apps and many artists perceive generative AI as stealing their art, so the anti-AI stance Procreate is taking is definitely discussion-worthy on HN.
Tron (1982) which was disqualified from Oscar contention as they had heavily used computers for the graphics and this was considered "cheating".
I feel like we're at a similar spot today with AI.
There's a big YouTube channel that does special fx challenges that proudly proclaims "No AI" but the winner of the challenge used tons of physics and crowd simulators.
That’s not cheating according to the definitions within this article that you’ve commented on.
Procreate is against gen AI on the grounded that it was unethically trained, and has become a vehicle of theft away from artists. They make a distinction between that and machine learning which is a very useful tools.
Easy for them to say that. The product is about manual drawing. It’s difficult to imagine where would you insert the AI in that process.
And maybe a smart strategy? If they add AI that will learn how you draw, and after couple of drawings will be able to draw for you, that may kill the product because artists will lose interest or reason to spend time with their product.
Maybe they realise that and just want to push away inevitable for as long as possible.
I wonder, they probably have same stance about AI coding, and have no need for that either.
I think there are two key differences: a spell checker doesn’t write the document for you or change your style (grammar checkers are closer to that) so your work is still your style and something you can claim copyright on. If you sell your work, that last part can be important. If you’re an artist, customers are paying you for your skills and the more you say a tool can do, the less they’re going to think your time is worth.
They also have a bit of a different market: their customers are people whose work has been used commercially without compensation to endanger their future livelihoods. It may be futile in the long run but I’d imagine there is a substantial market of people who don’t want to contribute to the problem or worry whether Adobe’s terms of service give them rights to screw you.
> Adobe seems to be getting a lot of backlash from creatives at least on social media.
That mainly seems to be about Adobe doing opt-out training on people's art and data (and sneakily re-enable that option for people who've already disabled it in the past), not just because Adobe now has AI features you could use. But maybe we're stuck in different bubbles/echo chambers.
Why do you say they "push away the inevitable"? Why would it be inevitable to have quality apps without AI integration? I would even argue that in a lot of cases, no AI integrationadds quality to the app.
CSP once tried to develop a full generative AI, but they killed the project after a big backlash on social media (especially from Japanese on twitter).
It seems that the current line drawn by artists is: the app dev can do anything with neutral network as long as it doesn't generate a whole image.
> "The product is about manual drawing. It’s difficult to imagine where would you insert the AI in that process."
I can imagine. In fact, I wrote a scifi novel that imagines it! :)
In the story, the idle elite has painting classes with an AI teacher. They have levels of engagement they can choose from: see something and paint it, see an AI-made painting of that something and copy it, copy it over projected lines into your canvas, paint only the filling colors over AI-created lines delineating it, let the AI-teacher-robot fix the painting for you after you are done. Every student goes home happily with the same painting in the same high AI-made quality. :)
It's a brilliant strategy, IMO. Maybe not to take over the whole industry, but to carve out a loyal niche. Are there many other top-tier creative apps that take such a clear position?
The thing that pops in my mind on misplaced AI integrations is: Copilot on Microsoft Word—infusing the caret with that God-Awful, purple Copilot “call to action.” Intuitively it makes sense to add AI capabilities to a writing program, but enough is enough. At this point it’s an insult on our collective intelligence.
If you ask me, keep the AI in a new, separate program.
Generative AI has a distinct workflow that is unique and the UX patterns will likely be different than traditional workflows. For instance: the generate, reject-or-accept loop.
I’m wondering how many people just copy and paste from their chat agent and simply ignore the other integrations (with respect to consumer products).
You also can't really stop the protests. People will be displaced from highly specialized skills that some spent a lifetime developing. Jobs that gave their lives meaning, financial security and a sense of community and accomplishment. You can't fault them for being angry or even hostile if they aren't presented with a dignified alternative. When you're building any disruptive technology, you should be prepared for hostility.
This is an important point. Modern man is conditioned to find purpose through employment. The notion of the heroism of work isn't as cartoonish as it was in communist societies, but it's implicitly there - in the centrality of work to every part of culture and customs like that go-to ice-breaker, "What do you do?" The psychological shift of moving past that will be every bit as challenging as the economic adjustments of full automation.
It's not just communism that celebrates the heroism of work. Providing for your family is viewed as a heroic act across civilizations. People speak of the sacrifices they make for their families. For most children, parents are their first superheroes and some of that is the safety and security they provide through their income, their sense of professional pride and success and participation in communities.
We can build a bleak dystopian AI driven future where we all work in service to the machines or we can build one that pays dividends by continuing to give humans an inflated sense of their potential. The later is preferable.
Protest = statement of objection. Visual artists are protesting by exploring legal solutions for economic recompense for the use of their work in training and inference. It's clear they see neural nets a mechanism for copying and modifying their original work without permission.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 50.5 ms ] threadThe iPad/Pencil combo knocks it into a cocked hat.
The kicker is that the Cintiq is around the same price (or more), and is less ergonomic.
I can't believe it's only $13 (I think I paid $10 many years ago). It's one of those rare apps that I wish was more expensive because a $13 purchase doesn't feel sustainable.
I should probably sign up for a Procreate course. The app is so deep that I know I'm only using the most basic features. If anybody has books or courses to recommend, I'm all ears.
I remember Corel Painter. It was about $400, and did many similar things.
I think it may no longer be around.
[1] https://app.sensortower.com/overview/425073498?country=US
I do suggest splurging for the more expensive Pencil Pro, though.
If you want to go the other way, the Mini works with the Pencil Pro (I have both).
https://www.creativebloq.com/buying-guides/best-ipad-for-pro...
I use a 2018 13" iPad Pro and I love that size because it's basically the same size as a sheet of 8.5x11 (or A4) paper. It's the perfect size for reading and marking up PDFs too.
Last year I bought and returned the M4 iPad Pro because they didn't make a Smart Keyboard Folio for it which I prefer to the more heavy duty Magic Keyboard. So I'm still using my 7 year old iPad worrying about what I'm going to do when it dies. I thought for sure somebody would make a knock off, but nobody has made anything that I think is as good as the Apple product.
For me, Procreate and GoodNotes are a killer combination that justify owning the device.
A close friend of mine (art college degree) has switched from oil / acrylic / watercolor to iPad - after trying it once.
Making a screen tablet is really hard. The iPad is general-purpose enough (and does not require a stylus) to make it worth the effort (and price -they ain't cheap), but a specialized one would likely fizzle, due to a limited customer base.
What about the apps? I've heard really good things about Krita, but what's the killer app?
What you would see in the past are "PC or Android with a tablet manufacturer's sticker on it". Wacom has a history of occasionally licensing their stuff for a laptop. And XPPen, for example, has made a few in the "Magic Drawing Pad" series now and they needed a few iterations to move away from being a generic OSI tablet to actually using their digitizer tech. These products don't excite tech enthusiasts - a fully integrated device, as opposed to screen and digitizer, comes with more concerns about all-round performance and value - and so far, the premium on them makes them compete with iPads. But there is tremendous demand for it - seemingly every "art kid" sees an iPad and Procreate as a milestone, because that combination is what the content creators they watch are using.
Are they? The iPad is in it's 15th year now. Apple has shown exactly what needs to be done yet there isn't enough interest in the open source community to develop (or sponsor development of) a solution. I don't see much evidence of change.
> because that combination is what the content creators they watch are using
But also because it's the best hardware and software and can be relatively inexpensive, especially if you are willing to buy used.
/s
https://apps.apple.com/us/charts/ipad/top-paid-apps/36
Their target audience seems pretty happy with their decision.
Training these neural networks that I procreated is very fulfilling.
They already have intelligence beyond the best models from OpenAI, Anthropocene, and Google.
I definitely encourage everyone who can on here to procreate.
And since we can talk about it without engaging with the article points, and talk about the words “Butlerian Jihad” I foresee many posts coming forth, decrying the luddites of the world
On the other hand, I can't help but feel it's mental gymnastics when Krita is implementing a neutral network based linework filter [0] while very vocally being against AI. I understand the technical details, and I still fail to see the nuances here.
[0]: https://krita-artists.org/t/introducing-a-new-project-fast-l...
As major differences I'd highlight: local and offline, so drawings not sent anywhere trained on artist work with explicit consent
In Krita's case, they claim the AI isn't generative so it doesn't add detail.
Whereas the AI today is trained on stolen work and often on the inputs as well.
And about the privacy and copyright concern, what we currently have are:
Stable Diffusion: local and offline, but not copyright-clean.
Adobe Firefly: online, but copyright-clean (if we believe Adobe's claim).
So if we combine the better sides of both, it suddenly becomes okay?
[0]: https://krita-artists.org/uploads/default/original/3X/1/4/14...
I think we are in agreement, I have used more descriptive wording to just clearly indicate what I consider as a filter.
(Edit: yeah, looking at the image I can see it clearly takes some artistic liberties. Even on the dragon.)
"It’s not a generative AI. It won’t invent anything. It won’t add details, any stylistic flourish besides basic line weight, cross-hatching or anything else. It won’t fix any mistakes. It will closely follow the provided sketch. I believe it won’t even be possible for a network of this size and architecture to “borrow” any parts of the images from the training dataset.
We will not be training the model on any of the existing datasets, or stolen pictures. All artworks will come from artists fully aware what it’s going to be used for. And our particular model will work better with special training data anyway, I believe. Maybe you’d want to help out with gathering the artworks - I will be making another post about that soon.
The calculations will be 100% local and offline. It won’t send the sketch image to any server to process and return the line art. I’m not planning to implement any networking functionality, and there are no servers planned either. It will only use your own computer CPU and GPU for calculations, the same way all of the other features of Krita do. It also won’t train on your images that you make in Krita. It won’t save it anywhere either, until you save it with Krita to your own device as usual, in a Krita file."
This being said, I don't think this is the correct approach. I don't think you need a convolution network or training. You would need some very carefully designed filters with parameters exposed to the user. Granted, this won't do as much of a "good job" at it, but the artist will touch it up anyways.
(And this isn't a strictly good/bad thing to me, it's a natural byproduct of a sufficiently advanced state of technology in the future being capable of automating every last productive human activity.)
I just made an original animated feature film where I sang %75 of the roles by using an AI tool(audimee.com) to convert my voice into others- I couldn't do that before- we're now creating Portuguese and Russian language versions of the songs with a tool that has a $20 usd/month subscription! Couldn't do that before!
For creatives/artists- As long as we don't use AI to generate ideas we're good, human generated ideas are a must- bring on all the AI tools!
The whole built on theft thing- as a human film director I could rattle off endless examples just in cinema of human directors "stealing" premises, sequences, shots, styles etc from other filmmakers with no consequences- so why stop the AI now?
I see the "theft" as being democratized now- large studios/entities with large resources have always been able to legally "steal" so with these AI tools I guess we all can now?
I make original animated films, games, music, art etc etc and I feel no "threat" at all from AI-
I feel the opposite as I'm excited to see what things they will allow me to do next as a micro-studio with limited budgets but unlimited creativity.
Aesthetics are dead now imo because of generative AI as anyone can be any "style" so now it is all about ideas- original human ideas.
If you're building tools to empower artists, this is antithetic to your mission, and simply unethical.
A majority of which will go to already rich people.
Its a sad state now, and a sad state in the future for humanity, where technology enables and accelerates accumulation of wealth, aided and abetted by the very consumers it consumes.
Total wealth is a meaningless metric.
You don't see any issue with machine learning models trained on huge amounts of copyrighted and patented materials basically scraped from the internet. Yes you can make your animated film and audio but at the cost of hugely controversial and non-transparent generative models.
> Aesthetics are dead now imo because of generative AI as anyone can be any "style" so now it is all about ideas- original human ideas.
This argument kind of conflicts with itself, no? Aesthetics are inferred from ideas either inspired or original.
I feel compensated on a spiritual level for my work- I do other things for money and my art can stay "pure" in a sense-
It's said that if you "sell your soul" you are unable to ever "buy it back"- so why sell it in the first place? Just so you can try to get "rich" and attempt to buy it back later because you are soulless and miserable? Doesn't make sense to me.
Maybe art is something higher? A higher cause? I was really inspired by the Rudolf Steiner book "The arts and their mission" early in my career- worth looking into if you are in the arts.
Look at the work spotlighted by Google to promote their new Flow tool: https://x.com/GoogleLabs/status/1925596282661327073 . This is a garbage imitation of a Guy Ritchie film or a Jose Cuervo ad (maybe more the latter).
Instead of being a tool for creatives it has empowered a number of grifters to churn out more and more "content" bypassing any concern about craft and formal restrictions that help generate creative work. The work that is most often created with the help of AI is not creative, it's a bland, tasteless simulacrum of creativity.
I think the blame is on the people who consume it.
Grifters will always grift- curation is what is important to sort through and ignore the slop- maybe there will be some systems with special fingerprinting algo's to "find" original human made non slop?
We pretty much cannot prove what's real and what's not anymore. Who knows the consequences of this. At worst, we might transform to an abysmally low-trust third-world society.
Why is that the line in the sand? And if someone did find inspiration and ideas from an AI, and made something popular with it, wouldn’t it be indistinguishable from any other piece of popular content?
In the past we used to be able to look forward to the future to solve obvious limitations of technology back then. Example is how limited and expensive it was to capture photos on rolls of film. Within the past 20 years we can now take effectively unlimited photos digitally on a device that can do much more than just take photos, and that limit has been abolished forever.
It is this forever that is starting to loom on us. Most of us can't imagine a life without Facebook, smartphones, addictive feeds and the like even if we don't directly use them. It is not possible to go back to a state of life untainted by this technology. So now a fancy new technology that promises to paint your end-products for you comes out and in the span of just a few years threatens to change the whole landscape of art that has been repeated in cycles for thousands of years, forever. It is only natural that some would loudly object.
But the same wheels driving human progress that removed the limitations of the disposable camera will not slow down at the stage of generative AI either. I don't see how this would happen given our intelligence has already gotten us far in many other domains. Progress is like a wildfire that eats up dry bushes. If enough of the medium is there it will spontaneously occur and not much can be done to prevent it. Except with technology, it is not dry timber but "what ifs." "What if art doesn't have to be defined by the journey to get there, but by a satisfying end product?" "What if a computer program could replicate the motions of a paintbrush, and create art indistinguishable from a human's?" Any one of us can come up with the next "what if."
Paradigm is shifting same as first camera wad invented. Obsession with reproducing reality was abolished and shift to all kinds of *isms. Some artist (ie Mucha) used new technology for improve their creative process. Some believed, that photography stole a part of our soul that was trapped on taken picture. It repeats. Just with different technologies.
I'm honestly very interest how we, as humans, will deal with it and how paradigm evolve.
Procreate knows their target users are skilled humans, and it’s been consistently refreshing to see them align their morals and beliefs to how much AI has stolen from the creative world.
I think unless you are a creative yourself, you’ll never be able to fully grasp just how sickening it’s been to watch and see centuries of artists blood, sweat, and tears all be garbled into a slop smoothie with no credit or citation.
Any creative who enjoys AI was most likely never a creative for the right reasons to begin with.
https://sketchboardpro.com/
Unless, there is some sort of "great filter" for all the AI technology, it will pretty much outdo every kind of human creativity and rush into customized highly tailored generated art.
Like you click the button and now you have 43243 new games just like one you finished couple of hours ago. Oh you are bored by having so much games? Let me drip feed you. Etc. Etc.
It's pretty much over.
You fell for it if you think this is ever going to happen.
HN doesn't have the kind of purity filter you are looking for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I feel like we're at a similar spot today with AI.
There's a big YouTube channel that does special fx challenges that proudly proclaims "No AI" but the winner of the challenge used tons of physics and crowd simulators.
Is that not cheating?
Procreate is against gen AI on the grounded that it was unethically trained, and has become a vehicle of theft away from artists. They make a distinction between that and machine learning which is a very useful tools.
And maybe a smart strategy? If they add AI that will learn how you draw, and after couple of drawings will be able to draw for you, that may kill the product because artists will lose interest or reason to spend time with their product.
Maybe they realise that and just want to push away inevitable for as long as possible.
I wonder, they probably have same stance about AI coding, and have no need for that either.
“Sketch me a wireframe of a person running”
“Can you add a flowing cape to my character in a similar art style?”
“Add stippling for the shadows on these objects assuming the light comes from the left of the scene”
Then you don't use your imagination. Obviously one can "snap" a sketch into a car or an owl or a house or whatever, keeping the style similar.
You could use your reasoning similarly to spell checkers.
They also have a bit of a different market: their customers are people whose work has been used commercially without compensation to endanger their future livelihoods. It may be futile in the long run but I’d imagine there is a substantial market of people who don’t want to contribute to the problem or worry whether Adobe’s terms of service give them rights to screw you.
Automated pattern and design fillers? Colour palette testers?
As you say though, it could be good business sense. Adobe seems to be getting a lot of backlash from creatives at least on social media.
That mainly seems to be about Adobe doing opt-out training on people's art and data (and sneakily re-enable that option for people who've already disabled it in the past), not just because Adobe now has AI features you could use. But maybe we're stuck in different bubbles/echo chambers.
It seems that the current line drawn by artists is: the app dev can do anything with neutral network as long as it doesn't generate a whole image.
I can imagine. In fact, I wrote a scifi novel that imagines it! :)
In the story, the idle elite has painting classes with an AI teacher. They have levels of engagement they can choose from: see something and paint it, see an AI-made painting of that something and copy it, copy it over projected lines into your canvas, paint only the filling colors over AI-created lines delineating it, let the AI-teacher-robot fix the painting for you after you are done. Every student goes home happily with the same painting in the same high AI-made quality. :)
Microsoft Paint has AI these days.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-image-creato...
> And maybe a smart strategy?
It's a brilliant strategy, IMO. Maybe not to take over the whole industry, but to carve out a loyal niche. Are there many other top-tier creative apps that take such a clear position?
If you ask me, keep the AI in a new, separate program.
Generative AI has a distinct workflow that is unique and the UX patterns will likely be different than traditional workflows. For instance: the generate, reject-or-accept loop.
I’m wondering how many people just copy and paste from their chat agent and simply ignore the other integrations (with respect to consumer products).
We can build a bleak dystopian AI driven future where we all work in service to the machines or we can build one that pays dividends by continuing to give humans an inflated sense of their potential. The later is preferable.