Procreate CEO James Cuda says the iPad illustration startup is “not going to be introducing any generative AI into our products”, drawing praise from creatives
Many Procreate users can breathe a sigh of relief now that the popular iPad illustration app has taken a definitive stance against generative AI.
Context & Ripple Effects
Procreate’s pledge lands in a creative-software debate already shaped by distrust over training data. Adobe previously had to deny that customer projects were used to train its generative-AI services, while artists were given tools intended to protect work from model scraping through imperceptible image perturbations.
The stance also sits within an iPad ecosystem where Apple says its own models rely on licensed and publicly available material rather than users’ private data. That makes Procreate’s choice a more categorical product-positioning decision than a narrow data-use assurance.
First-order effects
- Procreate users who oppose generative AI receive a clear commitment that the company will not add those features to its illustration products.
- The public praise strengthens Procreate’s standing with creatives for whom authorship, consent and control over the drawing workflow are purchase criteria.
Second-order effects
- Illustration-software rivals adding generative features face a sharper trade-off: pursue AI-assisted workflows or risk alienating users who see a non-AI tool as a safer creative environment.
- The decision makes provenance and training-policy assurances more commercially salient for creative-app vendors, even when they continue to offer AI tools.
Third-order effects
- If more specialist creative products adopt explicit no-generative-AI positions, the market could segment between AI-augmented production suites and tools differentiated by preserving conventional authorship workflows.
- That split would make AI adoption less of a default feature race and more a question of customer trust, workflow fit and the credibility of data-governance commitments.
The trend: Creative software is fragmenting into AI-enabled and AI-exclusionary product positions as vendors compete for users with different expectations around authorship and control.