With the new Apple Creator Studio Pro, artificial intelligence becomes a tool that helps you create, not replaces it

Artificial intelligence applications that can create photos, videos, songs and more are becoming increasingly popular. But with release of the new Apple Creator Studio Pro packagereleased publicly on Wednesday, the tech giant viewed the addition of artificial intelligence as a tool to aid in the creative process but is not trying to replace it.

Instead, Apple is offering a vision that suggests the future productivity suite is one that focuses on the needs of creators – whether they are filmmakers, musicians, artists or anyone else involved in the creative industry – and enables them to use artificial intelligence more effectively.

It's difficult to bring AI into the world of creativity, given the backlash and even legal action from creators who are angry that AI models are training on their creations and then reproducing similar art or creative content in the output of AI systems.

Apple, however, sees AI as a tool that can handle more basic and tedious tasks — like generating an editable slideshow from your notes, extracting chord information from a song, searching hours of video for the clip you need, changing the camera angle in photos, and more.

The tools in Creator Studio Pro aren't new, but they've never been available as a subscription, which is currently available for $12.99 per month or $129 per year.

The subscription includes Final Cut Pro, Motion and Compressor for video editing; Logic Pro and MainStage for music creation; Pixelmator Pro image editing tool; and a set of exclusive features in Keynote, Pages, Numbers and Freeform. The package also includes the newly launched Pixelmator Pro app for iPad.

While Apple's traditional productivity apps aren't on par with Google and Microsoft's, the tech giant has always been more successful in creative fields. And with the addition of AI features, the company likely sees an opportunity to make its creative software more accessible to people who aren't fully professionals – such as an independent musician or artist who wants to improve their marketing and sales, those who quickly compile videos for posting on social media, or those who want to create music or graphics and edit the results.

Whether Apple tools are suitable for a given task compared to Adobe products will depend on the user's specific needs and familiarity with professional creative tools.

Each tool in the suite received its own series of improvements at launch, both AI and non-AI. Notable additions include:

• Final Cut Pro: Artificial intelligence-powered transcription search to find the right fragment of audio in hours-long recordings; AI-powered visual search assistant that allows users to search for an object or action and add it to the timeline; beat detection for editing to the beat of the music, which uses an AI model to analyze music tracks; new Editing Wizard on iPad, allowing you to easily create video highlights from your footage; multi-select support for bulk editing, background export, and external monitor playback on iPad; Access content to enhance your videos, including graphics, dynamic titles and more.

• Professional logic: The new synth player feature, built on top of performances, adds a virtual session player that can play synth and bass parts; Chord ID, which uses artificial intelligence to analyze audio to extract chord information; Sound Packs and Producer Packs come to Mac with the Sound Library extension; the iPad app also gets new features like Quick Swipe Comping, which allows you to assemble recordings in ways other than what was captured; and AI-powered understanding of the loop library to find the right sound.

• Pixelmator Pro for Mac and iPad: The app, which is now available on iPad, already offers a range of AI features such as image enhancement (super resolution), display of composition suggestions (auto crop), artifact removal, retouching and much more. With the launch of Creator Suite, the app gets a new Liquid Glass design to match the rest of Apple's software, a new Warp tool for layer transformation, and Warp-based mockups to preview clothing or other product designs in real images.

• Keynote, Pages, Numbers and Freeform: These all-in-one productivity apps are gaining new features for Creator Studio subscribers, including new premium templates and themes in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, and a library of images and graphics in all four apps, called Content Hub; AI-powered image generation and remixing allows 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) or suggest compositions.

• Keynotenotably adds several AI features, including a new tool that uses text notes as a starting point to create a slideshow from scratch; AI can also generate presenter notes and organize slide content.

• NumbersMeanwhile, it can use AI to analyze patterns in spreadsheet data and make suggestions about table content (Magic Fill). It can also generate a formula that describes what it generated, so you can figure out how it works.

Apple says it will continue to offer its creative apps as standalone downloadsand existing users will continue to receive updates, including new features. Meanwhile, Keynote, Pages, Numbers and Freeform will remain free apps, but new, paid features will be locked to the subscription. This is an interesting option that allows users to purchase apps directly like before, as it sets Apple's offering apart from others like Adobe.

Additionally, Apple allows users to share apps via Family Sharing with up to five family members, which Adobe does not offer. Users can also cancel their subscription at any time without penalty. However, Adobe remains a fierce competitor thanks to its extensive and detailed tools that also work on iOS.

Some AI features are powered by Apple Intelligence, such as visual search and transcription in Final Cut Pro, which runs locally on your device. Others require the use of third-party services such as OpenAI, which enable advanced image generation, Keynote slides, and presenter notes. AI Features Creator Studios are processed on-device or use a private relay to anonymize traffic. Apple says these protections mean user content remains private and is never used for AI training.