James Cuda, CEO of the creativity app Procreate, shocked the creative and technology worlds last week when he announced on X that his company was never going to use generative artificial intelligence in its products. Immediately, the two communities took sides.
“The tech people said this was going to age like milk; that we were going in the wrong direction, and we were probably gonna change our mind,” Cuda tells me over a videoconference from his home in Tasmania.
Creative people, however, felt quite different: every comment Cuda could find on the internet was 100% positive, he says. “There was an overwhelming sentiment of relief within the creative community, because I think we were the first in the creative tools industry to stand up and say, ‘You know what, we don’t think this is a good idea.’”
An art app for everyone
The Procreate for iPad app is one of the most advanced and beloved natural drawing and painting tool in the world. Cuda’s company isn’t Adobe, but Procreate represents a very powerful force in the creative world.
Cuda says that he resisted saying anything about AI for months—even while the company’s competitors were going all-in on AI. “We always try to remain as neutral as possible because, if we really believe that art is for everyone, we try and make sure that our products are for everyone,” he says.
Then he spoke up. In a prerecorded video statement, Cuda was resolute in his choice to not use generative AI. “Our products are always designed and developed with the idea that a human will be creating something,” he said. “We don’t know exactly where this story is going to go or how it ends. But we believe that we’re on the right path supporting human creativity.”
Cuda says as more creative software companies embraced AI, things continued to get harder for artists. It was impossible to stay neutral anymore. “We didn’t want to make a hard stance. And to be honest, we would prefer not to have had this stance. We don’t really want to be a controversial figure in the industry,” he says.
The founder wanted Procreate to be a voice of creativity and unity, but that was increasingly hard to do in a climate where technology was shifting the foundation of what it means to be an artist. “When we’re so closely connected to the creative community, when we are seeing what’s happening to that community, the despair that that they’re going through and the outrage that they’re going through, we felt compelled to say something,” he says.
Cuda’s public statement was not a calculated marketing move, though he had meditated on it for years. He says he didn’t go around and ask everyone in the company what they thought about taking a stance before he did it because he knew his team felt similarly. “I think there was a little bit of fear that we may actually get involved in AI,” he recalls. “Coming out and making that statement alleviated everyone.” Everyone rallied behind it and nobody in the team pushed back. If anything, he says this new battle cry lit a new fire under the team to continue making creative tools that aligned with Procreate’s community.
A shift in thinking
Cuda’s anti-AI stance has evolved over the years. A couple of years ago, the Procreate team was actually pretty excited about the technology. They thought about ways to use generative AI, but quickly came to the conclusion that there was an intrinsic problem with it. The way diffusion AI works doesn’t really match the creative journey.
The creative journey, Cuda says, isn’t just about having an idea and then obtaining an instant output. “There’s a whole journey that is so important to the creative,” he says. “In fact, that’s the reason why people love to draw, love to paint, love to write poetry.” For him, the process of going from spark to final product is the most important part of any creative adventure.
There’s excitement, frustration, flow. Paths open and close until you get to a point where you know you’re on the right track. It’s a place where your world gets suddenly silent and you find the creative magic that is impossible to grasp and define.
AI doesn’t get you there. Today, it’s a trick. On a deeper level, it’s robbing us from being human. And if you think about the future, when AI gets to the level in which it actually becomes creative, what’s left for us? Cuda believes that creativity, the process of drawing, painting, writing, designing, is the core of what makes us human. “It’s one of the most important things that we possess. And I think if we’re removing that or we’re going down a path that jeopardizes our greatest asset, then I think we should just stop and pause and think about it before we start steam rolling down into the future,” he says. “Because where that goes is not a good place.”
He believes that AI has a place in the world. It can save us time, so we can spend more around family and friends. It can help us do the things we don’t want to do. But what he doesn’t want is technology to take away the stuff we love, the stuff that gives us meaning, the stuff that drives civilization forward. “What we should be doing is getting AI or machines to really help us do the tasks that we don’t want to do so we have more time for creativity,” he says.
Carefully wading into an AI future
While Cuda and his team promise they will never use generative AI, that doesn’t mean they won’t use any form of AI in the future. They will always avoid the “write-a-prompt-and-had-AI-do-everything” type of AI, but if there is, say, some specific development challenge in the future that requires using machine learning, they are open to use it with one caveat. The machine learning tools must have not been trained on human-created work without express consent from the artists, which is what other companies—including Adobe, OpenAI, and Shutterstock—have done to train their generative AIs.
Cuda believes that this can be done if you are careful. “Machine learning is just another tool in the developer toolbox,” he tells me. All that said, he doesn’t see anything that requires the use of machine learning in the road map they have planned for the next five years. What they have in mind only requires your usual mix of smart math and regular programming.
However, it is clear that, right now, in this AI weapons race, nobody is truly giving a damn about ethics. Cuda sees the AI boom as just another Silicon Valley gold rush that prioritizes making money over thoughtfully deploying a new technology. ”There is this huge push to put these tools and technologies in every nook and cranny, another gold rush where people are just running towards any kind of avenue they can, hoping to hit a jackpot,” he says. “It’s a very different take from our perspective because, again, we’re looking to solve problems for our customers, which is very different to what’s happening in the industry.”