Fifteen years in the past, Freepik was simply one other inventory picture supplier, serving to designers discover the proper visuals for his or her tasks. In the present day, it is a fully totally different beast—a generative AI hub attracting over 60 million guests a month.
The shift wasn’t unintentional. It was the results of an organization keen to rethink its objective and transfer past static photographs to one thing a lot larger: a totally AI-powered inventive ecosystem.
Sitting in his front room , Freepik CEO Joaquín Cuenca Abela spoke with Decrypt concerning the state of the AI business and the way his firm harnessed the chance generative AI introduced for digital artists.
“When generative AI appeared, we noticed we might broaden our mission,” he advised Decrypt. “We have been now not restricted to serving to designers with pre-made content material. As an alternative, we might adapt to what they wanted and create one thing distinctive for every individual.”
The transfer paid off. Freepik is now a one-stop store for AI-powered picture and video era, upscaling, animation, and extra. Cuenca Abela put it merely: “We simply wish to give creatives extra management.”
From clean web page to AI engine
Freepik began with a easy premise: get rid of the frustration of gazing a clean web page. Earlier than AI, the platform offered tens of millions of inventory photographs and templates that creatives might use as beginning factors.
“The slowest, most painful a part of the inventive course of was ranging from zero,” Cuenca Abela stated. “We helped get rid of that barrier by giving designers tens of millions of photographs they might start creating with.”
Now, with generative AI, Freepik doesn’t simply provide a library of content material—the agency creates it on demand.“A photographer wasn’t a standard Freepik consumer,” stated Cuenca Abela. “They already had their photographs. However now, with our upscaler Magnific, they will improve them in methods they by no means might earlier than.”
The shift has broadened its viewers past graphic designers. Photographers use it to boost, tweak, and upscale photographs. Filmmakers experiment with AI-generated visuals, architects and inside designers construct ideas in ways in which have been as soon as time-consuming and costly, and the typical Joe makes use of it to generate lovely waifus—as a result of, in fact, it’s AI we’re speaking about.
Not simply one other picture generator
Within the crowded AI area, Freepik is specializing in workflow integration. Most AI instruments specialise in one factor, be it picture era, video creation, or upscaling. Freepik connects all of them, performing like a hub that integrates totally different open- and closed-source generative AI instruments in a single place.
Amongst different providers, the corporate’s AI suite consists of:
- Picture era with fashions like Mystic, Flux, Ideogram, and Google Imagen
- Customized LoRA coaching for constant character and elegance era
- Video era utilizing seven totally different fashions, together with Google’s V2, Hunyuan, Luma, Kling, Hailuo, and Minimax
- Enhancing instruments for inpainting, outpainting, filters and seamless picture enlargement
- Audio era, together with music, voice-over, and sound results
- SVG conversion capabilities for vector-based belongings.
One of many largest success tales has been Magnific, Freepik’s AI-powered upscaler. It went viral for its skill to boost picture particulars with out distorting them—one thing even top-tier AI fashions have struggled with.
Then, Mystic was the icing on the cake, offering outcomes that have been able to competing towards state-of-the-art fashions like Ideogram or MirJourney. Mystic is definitely a workflow, utilizing Flux as a core mannequin with numerous tweaks behind the scenes.
That stated, numerous consultants and fanatics have tried to imitate Freepik’s secret sauce—which depends on open-source fashions—with blended outcomes. Freepik has a method to supply high quality outcomes, persistently, with the most effective consumer interface attainable, which is what clients are paying for.
“Folks generally underestimate the distinction between an excellent product and a very good product,” Cuenca Abela stated. “The final 10% takes 90% of the hassle. That’s why many tried replicating Magnific, however could not fairly nail it.”
The copyright debate
With AI-generated content material comes controversy. Many artists argue that AI builders unfairly practice their fashions utilizing copyrighted works with out permission. Cuenca Abela doesn’t dismiss their considerations, however stated he sees the difficulty otherwise.
“Should you required permission from each particular person creator to coach an AI mannequin, these fashions merely couldn’t exist,” he stated. “It’d be like asking permission to index each single internet web page earlier than launching Google.”
He acknowledges the stress.
“This within the brief time period damages the artist—utilizing one thing created by the artist. For the [affected] artists, it is a state of affairs of profound injustice,” he advised Decrypt, recognizing that such development compelled them to evolve as enterprise. “One thing comparable occurred to us. When (AI) emerged, our enterprise all of the sudden introduced much less worth to the desk. We needed to adapt.”
That stated, he argues that AI-generated photographs aren’t direct copies. “The criticism conventional artists often have is that their photographs have been used with out permission, which is completely true,” he admitted. “However the counterpoint is that the pictures these fashions produce aren’t copies. If an individual had made them, there wouldn’t be a declare of copyright infringement.”
The core of the talk is mainly the trade-off between inventive management and technological progress. Cuenca Abela believes society will in the end favor AI’s advantages—simply because it did when comparable debates surrounded images killing portray, digital artwork killing conventional artwork, or web search engines like google and yahoo killing encyclopedias.
“As a society, we’ll have to stability issues and decide. If permission from the creator is required to coach a mannequin, generative fashions for textual content and pictures will not exist.” he stated. “[If that happens, then] society loses all of the progress that textual content fashions present. They might help us discover vaccines, medicines; the scientific developments they will convey are great. All that progress is misplaced.”
Cuenca additionally sees AI as a device for self expression. He doesn’t differentiate AI artists from artists.
“There’s no distinction. It’s a device. AI is a method to specific what you need, and artwork is the expression of what’s inside you, what occurred to you, your life experiences—effectively, you are able to do that with AI, with work, with pictures… It should depend upon the artist,” he advised Decrypt.
“For me, it’s completely artwork and it’s legit. I don’t have an moral downside with that.”
Open fashions vs. closed techniques
There was consensus about closed-source being the go-to choice for finish customers, with fashions and applied sciences often being extra user-friendly and offering a better-quality expertise than open choices. Nevertheless, issues have drastically modified through the years.
Secure Diffusion revolutionized AI artwork, Llama was key to bringing native textual content era to the plenty, and extra not too long ago, DeepSeek R1 reignited the talk about closed-source AI firms overcharging for his or her fashions.
Nevertheless, some customers nonetheless desire closed-source choices. Cuenca Abela has robust opinions concerning the AI business’s future, notably within the battle between open-source and proprietary fashions.
“By way of code, state-of-the-art open-source is on the identical degree as proprietary fashions,” he stated. “The largest distinction is coaching time and dataset curation, an extended post-training section, a bit higher tagging, and so on. However as for technical degree, I do not see a lot of a spot.”
Whereas proprietary fashions like MidJourney and Ideogram get extra refinement, Cuenca sees open-source alternate options closing the hole shortly. He factors to Flux for instance: “It may be a tiny step behind the most effective closed fashions, however not two steps. And since it’s open, the neighborhood fine-tunes and builds on it, generally surpassing the closed variations.”
For Freepik, selection and suppleness are the priorities. “Somebody who is aware of the right way to use Freepik will get higher high quality than MidJourney,” Cuenca Abela stated. “Should you want photorealism, now we have Google Imagen. Should you want creative textual content era, use Ideogram. Should you want character consistency, practice a LoRA. No single mannequin is the reply to all the things.”
In different phrases, there’s no jack of all trades in AI. And the flexibility of selecting open and closed-source fashions on demand is extraordinarily necessary to get the granularity required for the proper murals—one that actually resembles what the consumer has in thoughts.
Freepik’s AI video wager
Not too long ago, Freepik has doubled down on AI-powered video instruments. The corporate built-in Google’s Veo 2, which dramatically improves video era high quality.
“Earlier than Veo 2, you needed to generate 10 or 20 movies to get one which labored,” Cuenca Abela notes. “Now, with Veo 2, you get an excellent consequence each different strive.”
However the true game-changer for video artists can be an upcoming AI video editor, he stated. As an alternative of simply producing brief clips, customers will quickly be capable to assemble full movies totally within Freepik.
“In the present day you possibly can solely make video clips—solely generate small clips of two seconds, 3 seconds, 8 seconds. We’re engaged on one thing that permits folks to edit them on the web page itself, add audio, and do the entire composition in order that you find yourself along with your clip,” Cuenca Abela advised Decrypt.
“The objective is to make Freepik the inventive hub the place you don’t want to go away the platform to complete a undertaking,” he stated.
The way forward for AI: Alternative or concern?
Are we near synthetic basic intelligence, or AGI? Will machines change us? Cuenca Abela sees AI’s speedy improvement as each thrilling and unsettling.
“[AGI] feels shut now—a lot nearer than anybody anticipated just some years in the past,” he admitted. “We went from folks dismissing AI as a toy to machines that may assume.”
There may be probably not consensus about what precisely constitutes AGI, however it may be broadly conceived as a kind of synthetic intelligence that may perceive, be taught, and apply data throughout mainly any subject at a human-like degree or past, being able to adapting to new issues. We’re at the moment in a state of “slim AI,” with fashions that excel at some issues however underperform at others.
That shift, he argued, raises massive existential questions. “Machines may be paused, restarted, or copied. People can’t. These variations matter,” he stated. “It means we’ll all the time have a singular place alongside expertise.”
Whereas some concern AI changing human creativity, Cuenca Abela stays optimistic about its potential. “I feel it will trigger a really profound and robust acceleration that feels a bit overwhelming. We don’t know what we’ll be capable to obtain sooner or later.”
A bit extra right down to earth, he thinks the fast future could convey us extra instruments that assist machines perceive precisely what the consumer desires, being far more correct and offering higher-quality outcomes. And Freepik’s new philosophy seems to level towards that route, changing into a hub during which artists can discover all the things they should flip an AI era into their very own imagined murals.
“That is our mission: Serving to folks make nice designs to specific the ability of their concepts,” stated Cuenca Abela. “AI for us is only a device—however it’s how folks work together with AI that issues.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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