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Hey, computer, make me a font

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Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#61

Post by rogerclark »

colesantiago wrote: post #58
gigglesupstairs wrote: post #52

"Fucking Hell" - first thing I yelled to myself when I saw that headline Kudos for the project, of course, but it just saddens me a bit more. Nothing is sacred anymore.

> Kudos for the project, of course, but it just saddens me a bit more. Nothing is sacred anymore. Why does this sadden you? I'm quite happy everything is being done by AI, time will be freed for other things that are more important. Manual font making will not go away though and now anyone can make their own fonts for free.

You don't know that the time will be freed for other things that are more important. We don't know for sure how this is all going to work out at all.

And people who make fonts, create art, and write prose generally do these things because they like doing them, not because they're forced to. These technologies aren't automating drudgery, they're automating things that give people's lives meaning. What's the endgame here exactly?

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#63

Post by OnlyMortal »

euroderf wrote: post #57

Has anyone tried using an LLM to make a font based on their handwriting ? EDIT: There's a couple (IIRC) of online services that offer this.

If it was my handwriting, it wouldn’t be popular.

Perhaps a cursive font might be good though I’m pretty sure one exists.

An expert system might be able to join up the letters in cursive and make intentional mistakes to give it the character of natural handwriting?

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#66

Post by colesantiago »

rogerclark wrote: post #61
colesantiago wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kudos for the project, of course, but it just saddens me a bit more. Nothing is sacred anymore. Why does this sadden you? I'm quite happy everything is being done by AI, time will be freed for other things that are more important. Manual font making will not go away though and now anyone can make their own fonts for free.

You don't know that the time will be freed for other things that are more important. We don't know for sure how this is all going to work out at all. And people who make fonts, create art, and write prose generally do these things because they like doing them, not because they're forced to. These technologies aren't automating drudgery, they're automating things that give people's lives meaning. What's the endgame he…

Time will be freed, ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion has collectively saved countless people billions of hours of time and this will do the same.

The big font makers no longer have a hold on extremely pricey fonts that are inaccessible, the general endgame is most software is going free and open source thanks to AI, and that is a good thing.

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#67

Post by dave78 »

rogual wrote: post #62

> THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG It's "a" quick brown fox, otherwise the sentence has no "a".

Huh, I never gave that sentence much thought, and I guess I never realized it conveniently covered the whole alphabet. It makes so much more sense now!

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#68

Post by rogerclark »

colesantiago wrote: post #66
rogerclark wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know that the time will be freed for other things that are more important. We don't know for sure how this is all going to work out at all. And people who make fonts, create art, and write prose generally do these things because they like doing them, not because they're forced to. These technologies aren't automating drudgery, they're automating things that give people's lives meaning. What's the endgame he…

Time will be freed, ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion has collectively saved countless people billions of hours of time and this will do the same. The big font makers no longer have a hold on extremely pricey fonts that are inaccessible, the general endgame is most software is going free and open source thanks to AI, and that is a good thing.

Creatives will have their hopes and dreams stripped away so that artless and tasteless software engineers can type words into a box and instantly get exactly what they want, with no surprises, no feelings, and no economic upsides for anyone else. A beautiful future indeed.

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#69

Post by gwern »

martincmartin wrote: post #55

Douglas Hofstader, the author of Godel Escher Bach, thought the task of creating fonts could only be solved with general AI. https://www.m-u-l-t-i-p-l-i-c-i-t-y.org/media/pdf/Metafont-M... The Letter Spirit project aims to model artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform "gridfonts" (typefaces limited to a grid).

I read that a while ago and thought that it was interesting: Hofstadter was right that it would require much more general approaches than Knuth's approach of 'think very hard and tweak a hand-engineered knob', because that's how all the past VAE/GAN/RNN work on typography-related stuff has worked.

As for the broader question of whether such approaches are general AI, well, that's a bullet Hofstadter is increasingly willing to bite, as upset as it makes him: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kAmgdEjq2eYQkB5PP/douglas-ho...

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#70

Post by gwern »

ilaksh wrote: post #49
PaulHoule wrote: post #12

Kinda funny how it works well at this whereas diffusion models go to die when it comes to drawing text but of course it works in a completely different manner.

SDXL can do text kind of. Also isn't DALLE-3 a diffusion model? But yeah overall diffusion has not generally been able to do it at all before.

> But yeah overall diffusion has not generally been able to do it at all before.

Imagen/Parti were doing text just fine long before DALL-E 3 was announced. GANs were also learning some text in the earlier runup (even ProGAN was doing striking 'moon runes' - amusingly, they were complete gibberish because it did mirroring data augmentation).

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