Procreate tells users, 'AI is not our future'

The debate over generative AI is a heated one, with many artists expressing fear that their art is being harvested to fuel prompt-driven image creators. And, the fear is reasonable — after all, Microsoft Copilot has shown time and time again that it has no issue creating images that heavily feature copyrighted material.

Adobe, too, has announced that its terms of service give it carte blanche access to its user's content, though it has gone on to clarify that it "does not train Firefly Gen AI models on customer content."

Now, in response to many companies rushing to include generative image features in their products, Procreate has issued a public statement outlining its stance on the matter.

"Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things. Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future," the statement reads. "We think machine learning is a compelling technology with a lot of merit, but the path generative AI is on is wrong for us."

The company also clarifies its stance on user privacy by noting that it does not track user activity in the app and does not have access to a user's art by design.

Generative AI is a form of artificial intelligence that uses large databases of images, text, videos, and other data to create data using a user-provided prompt. This type of AI is trained on large datasets of material scraped from the internet, much of which is unethically obtained and often contains copyrighted material.

Apple has several generative features in the works. This includes both generative image creators and generative text creation and editing, similar to features provided by Grammarly and Google.

It currently maintains that its generative AI has been the only one trained legally and ethically.