Krita Looking More At GPU Acceleration & AI In 2024

The Krita open-source graphics editor and digital art program is looking at possibly adding some AI features to its arsenal as well as possible GPU acceleration and other new features in 2024.

First up, the Krita developers do acknowledge they'll need to eventually port from the Qt5 to Qt6 toolkit. Among the features they hope to tackle this year though is Blender integration, a new layer type for comic books, a system to create flexible text balloons, a system to provide tool presets, a new UI for handling palettes, an animation audio waveform display, and support for animation reference frame workflows.

On the GPU side they were considering using the GPU for brushes but then the developers decided the brush performance is good enough. Instead they'll be investigating using GPUs to optimize transform masks.

They are also considering adding AI features to the Krita digital painting program. Their current thinking on the Krita AI side is:

"And there's the most controversial thing of all: should we add AI features to Krita? We have had several heated discussions amongst developers and artists on the mailing list and on invent.kde.org.

The artists in the meeting argued that generative AI is worthless and would at best lead to bland, repetitive templates, but that assistive AI could be useful. In order to figure out whether that's true, we started investigating one particular project: AI-assisted inking of sketches. This is useful, could replace a tedious step when doing art while still retaining the artistic individuality. Whether it will actually make it to Krita is uncertain of course, but the investigation will hopefully help us understand better the issue, the possibilities and the problems.

Note: we won't be implementing anything that uses models trained on scraped images and we will make sure that the carbon footprint of the feature doesn't exceed its usefulness."

More details on Krita's 2024 plans via the Krita.org blog.