James Cuda

James Cuda co-founded Savage Interactive in Hobart, Tasmania in 2011 with his wife Alanna, building Procreate into the standard digital-painting app for millions of illustrators and an Apple Design Award winner. Sold once for a modest one-time price with no subscription, Procreate cultivated rare goodwill among working artists — the community hit hardest by image generators trained on scraped portfolios.

“We’re never going there”

In August 2024, as rivals raced to bolt generative features onto creative software, Procreate posted a stark video of its CEO to X with the caption “we’re never going there.” Staring into the camera, Cuda declared that he really f***ing hates generative AI, that he dislikes what it is doing to artists, and that Procreate would never introduce generative AI into its products. A companion page on Procreate’s site declared that generative AI is “ripping the humanity out of things” and that the company’s products are always built on the assumption that a human is creating.

The clip went viral, drawing millions of views and near-universal applause from illustrators — the same community that had flocked to Cara after watching other tools quietly train on their work — and coverage from TechCrunch to Fortune framed it as a defining moment of AI-era brand positioning. Skeptics noted the obvious: hating AI is also excellent marketing when your entire customer base is angry artists, and a pledge is only as durable as the next board meeting. So far, Procreate has kept it.