This app is rejecting generative AI altogether. Good!

In the tech world, executives rarely brag about the opportunities they’ve chosen not to seize. So earlier this week, it was a bit of a shocker when James Cuda declared that he @$*#! hated generative AI, and his company’s products wouldn’t adopt it.

And yet, it also made perfect sense. Cuda is the CEO of Procreate, the maker of a wondrous iPad app for drawing, painting, and animating with uncannily realistic digital art supplies. And among my friends who are professional visual artists, @$*#! hatred of generative AI runs deep. They regard the technology’s reliance on artwork created by humans for training purposes as intellectual property theft, at least in any instance where a human creator didn’t provide express consent. They also don’t like the prospect of competing with machines for work, and see AI imagery as devaluing their own craft. Just the aesthetic of stuff churned out by OpenAI’s DALL-E and its rivals—an algorithmically derived simulacrum of artistry, minus the soul—is like fingernails on a blackboard to them.

The creative class’s distrust of AI has resulted in several recent controversies involving other software purveyors. In June, Adobe experienced brutal pushback to changes it made to its terms of service that customers interpreted as giving it new latitude to use their art to train its Firefly AI. A month later, Figma pressed pause on a new feature for generating software interfaces after an iOS developer pointed out that its weather app designs looked like knockoffs of Apple’s app. In both cases, the companies said that some of the angst was due to misunderstanding of what was going on. But their users’ existing hypersensitivity around AI gave them little room for error.

By ignoring the GenAI moment, Procreate will please artists who see the tech as a pox on their profession, not a boon to their productivity. It also may avoid creating kerfuffles for itself that could be inevitable even if it tried to implement AI thoughtfully—as, to be fair, both Adobe and Figma have made a good-faith effort to do. That makes its decision a canny marketing move as well as a defensible ethical stance.

If Procreate’s software weren’t so good, I’d care less about the possibility of AI mucking it up. The 13-year-old product is the rare app that has grown continuously more capable without ever adding anything that feels superfluous or poorly thought-out. It offers a polished, dependable experience that’s at odds with GenAI’s tendency to veer into embarrassing behavior that can confound even its creators.

By contrast, Adobe’s Photoshop has been overwhelming and unintuitive all along, which might be why I don’t object to its full-on embrace of GenAI. (I happily use the technology there for purposes such as retouching damaged family photos.) Of course, publicly traded behemoths such as Adobe have no choice but to be AI enthusiasts: Wall Street sees the technology as the industry’s next engine of growth and is watching carefully. For instance, when Adobe issued a weak sales forecast in March, investors took it as a worrisome sign the company was behind on AI. Three months later, when the company reported robust numbers, investors decided that AI was paying off after all.

Pressure to prove AI bona fides also helps explain why Google’s new Pixel 9 phones swap out the aging Assistant voice interface for Gemini, a new feature that’s far more conversational than the Assistant but incomplete when it comes to supporting everyday functionality such as dictating notes. (Here’s my colleague Jared Newman’s report on the switch, which he calls a “train wreck.”) At least Google gave Pixel owners the option to go back to the Assistant, an acknowledgment that Gemini remains a work in progress. But at the moment, shipping AI products in unfinished or even unusable states is the norm.

Procreate is free to stay true to its GenAI-adverse convictions in part because it’s a small company that doesn’t seem to be obsessed with profit maximization. (Its iPad app is $13—as a one-time purchase, not a monthly subscription—which is an absurd value, particularly for something many professionals use for paying work.) My favorite iPad app for writing, Scrivener, is the product of an even tinier outfit and is currently AI-free; while I could see it harnessing the technology to summarize long documents, I’m happy to see it move slowly while the Microsoft Words and Google Docs of the world charge ahead.

Meanwhile, Procreate CEO Cuda’s rejection of GenAI may have a loophole. “We don’t exactly know where this story’s gonna go or how it ends,” he says in his video. “But we believe we’re on the right path supporting human creativity.”

Should the story eventually lead to a place where Procreate finds a way to add generative AI on its own terms—to bolster self-expression rather than merely mimic it—I hope it does. Given the company’s track record of excellence, I trust it to do the right thing.

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