Generative AI apps that can create photos, videos, songs, and more are becoming increasingly popular. But with the release of Apple’s new Creator Studio Pro suite, which became generally available on Wednesday, the tech giant has approached adding AI as a tool to aid creators in their process, not to replace it.
Instead, Apple is offering a vision that suggests its future productivity suite will focus on the needs of filmmakers, musicians, artists, or other creators caught up in some creative industry, and use AI to help them become more efficient.
Bringing AI into the creative world can be difficult, given the backlash and even legal action from creators angry about training AI models on their own work and replicating similar art and creative content with the output of their AI systems.
But Apple sees AI as a tool that handles many basic and boring tasks, such as generating a slideshow for editing from notes, extracting chord information from a song, finding the clip you want from hours of video footage, and changing the camera angle of an image.
While Creator Studio Pro’s tools aren’t new, they’ve never been packaged as a subscription product and are currently available for $12.99 per month or $129 per year.
Subscription includes Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Compressor for video editing. Logic Pro and MainStage for music production. Image editing tool Pixelmator Pro; also includes a set of exclusive features for Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform. The suite also includes the newly released Pixelmator Pro app for iPad.
Although Apple’s traditional productivity software applications have not kept up with those of Google and Microsoft, the tech giant has always had more success in the creative field. And with the addition of AI capabilities, the company seems to see the potential to make its creative software more accessible to people who aren’t completely experts, such as independent musicians and artists who want to improve marketing and sales, people who want to quickly edit video footage to post on social media, or people who want to create music or art and edit the output.
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The suitability of Apple’s tools for the job compared to Adobe’s products depends on the user’s specific needs and familiarity with professional creative tools.
Each tool in the suite receives its own set of upgrades for this release, both AI and otherwise. Notable additions include:
Final Cut Pro: AI-powered transcript search to find the right soundbites from hours of footage. An AI-powered visual search assistant lets users search for objects and actions to add to their timeline. Beat detection for editing to match the rhythm of the music. Analyze music tracks using AI models. The new Montage Maker on iPad makes it easy to create highlight videos from your footage. Batch editing, background export, and multi-selection support for external monitor playback on iPad. Access graphics, dynamic titles, and more to enhance your videos.
Logic Pro: New Synth Player feature built from Performance adds a virtual session player that lets you play synth keyboard and bass parts. Chord ID uses AI to analyze audio and extract chord information. Expanding the Sound Library adds sound packs and producer packs to your Mac. The iPad app also adds new features like quick swipe comping, which lets you assemble recordings differently than they were captured. AI-powered loop library understanding helps you find the right sound.
Pixelmator Pro for Mac and iPad: Now available on iPad, the app already offers a number of AI features, including image upscaling (super resolution), composition suggestions (auto-crop), artifact removal, and retouching. With the release of Creator Suite, the app now has new liquid glass designs to match Apple’s other software, new warp tools to reshape layers, and warp-powered mockups to preview apparel and other product designs with real-world images.
Keynote, Pages, Numbers, Freeform: These versatile productivity apps have new features for Creator Studio subscribers, including new premium templates and themes for Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, and an image and graphics library across all four apps called Content Hub. AI-powered image generation and remixing capabilities allow creators to choose from pre-built configuration options to change the style, orientation, or camera angle of photos, graphics, icons, or other visual concepts. Other AI tools can enhance images (using super-resolution features) and make composition suggestions.
Specifically, Keynote has added several AI features. This includes a new tool to create slideshows from scratch using your text notes as a starting point. AI can also generate presenter notes and clean up slide content.
Numbers, on the other hand, uses AI to analyze patterns in spreadsheet data and suggest table contents (Magic Fill). You can also generate formulas that explain what you’ve generated, so you can learn how it works.
Apple says it will continue to offer its creativity apps as standalone downloads, and existing users will continue to receive updates with these new features. Meanwhile, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform remain free apps, but new premium features are locked into the subscription. Allowing users to choose to purchase apps outright, as they have in the past, is an interesting choice, as it is what differentiates Apple’s products from those of other companies such as Adobe.
Additionally, Apple allows users to share apps with up to five family members through Family Sharing, which Adobe does not offer. Users may cancel their subscription at any time without penalty. However, Adobe remains a strong competitor with extensive and in-depth tools that also work on iOS.
Some of our AI features are powered by Apple Intelligence, including visual and transcript search in Final Cut Pro that runs locally on your device. Others include the use of third parties such as OpenAI to power advanced image generation, keynote slides, presenter notes, and more. Creator Studio’s AI capabilities are processed on-device or use private relays to anonymize traffic. Apple says these protections mean user content is kept private and never used for AI training.
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