gguillotte

Per statements by companies: "Our customers expect a human touch to our releases, and so long as the ethical and legal circumstances surrounding these programs remains murky and undefined, we are unwilling to associate our brands with the technology in any way." or: "Our internal guidelines remain the same with regard to artificial intelligence tools: We require artists, writers, and creatives contributing to the Magic TCG to refrain from using AI generative tools to create final Magic products. We work with some of the most talented artists and creatives in the world, and we believe those people are what makes Magic great." and, after being confronted by customers for using generative features in marketing images: "Now we’re evaluating how we work with vendors on creative beyond our products – like these marketing images – to make sure that we are living up to those values.” and in marketplace advisement, such as: "AI art, AI writing, or algorithm-based creation is prohibited on the Infinite Platform. Any product posted to Infinite that contains AI-generated art or writing where very little human work was done is subject to removal." In practice, this has included artworks that were primarily human-generated but used tools like generative fills, and texts where creators admitted that they used generative AI to supplement, edit, or restructure their own writing. In chat rooms and on social media where creators in this field congregate, they raise products to each other that they suspect contain generative AI, investigate them together, and collectively report them to marketplaces until the products are removed.

Any product using generative AI in any capacity makes it a business risk for me, because the creative field I work in strictly prohibits its use in any capacity for any content, writes those prohibitions into contracts and publisher agreements, and enforces them aggressively. I'm not morally opposed to the features and personally find them fascinating, but strictly pragmatically there should be options to completely disable them in creative software, and if its usage is automatic and either opt-out or unavoidable then I will always prefer a less-capable tool that lacks any such features, not out of a knee-jerk reaction but to protect my relationship with such clients.

It's interesting in my day job to chat about TinyMCE and Redis reneging on non-binding licensing promises and making disruptive changes that force people to stop using their products. Then I close my day-job laptop, open my freelance laptop, and get to read non-binding licensing promises that, were they to be reneged upon, would be disruptive changes that force people to stop using their products. Not one tech company is worthy of trust for trust's sake. Nevermind that none of these promises assuage any of the concerns prevalent in the creative field that hires me to use Affinity tools—even if they did, these are non-binding pledges that require a degree of trust that has already been damaged.

If customers were valued remotely as much as Canva's offer, this acquisition likely would not be happening.

If these in particular served the purposes or were responsive to users, we probably wouldn't be here using Affinity products. These have been around, and considerably inferior, for decades, and not coincidentally have been the most opaque or outright hostile to contributions from non-developers. Krita and Inkscape have done better, but it would take a Blender-scale effort to turn Scribus from what it is now into a comparable tool.

AI-generated content is explicitly prohibited in my field. Using it, even unintentionally, is prohibited by storefronts' legal contracts and user agreements, and can and has caused creators and products to be banned from their marketplaces. Generative AI usage in this field is heavily policed both by companies and other creatives. Any features using generative AI added to Affinity products make those products more dangerous to use; they are anti-features that reduce the software's value at any price. And any integrations between Affinity products and Canva, which is now reliant on generative AI tools for a significant portion of its revenue and uses creators' works to train its models, are consequently also anti-features. This acquisition demonstrably hurts users, regardless of when or if there are any changes to licensing, subscriptions, releases, development, or support. There are no letters of explanation or planning roadmaps that will change this. It took immediate and arguably irrevocable effect the moment the acquisition was announced. If Serif wanted investment to expand or grow its offerings or secure its future, Canva could have invested in and partnered with Serif—which as has been noted was already profitable—without acquiring a controlling stake. The only reason to agree to this unsolicited acquisition offer is the co-founders' greed; two people get two-thirds of the benefit and the other 90 split the rest.

I work on both Windows and OS X, and I bought Foundry's Mischief to support their work to release on both platforms, as well as their ability to release independent of the Mac App Store. I look forward to being able to do the same for Affinity.