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Hey, computer, make me a font

serce.me

101–110 of 150 posts

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#101
post #92

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…

>What's the endgame here exactly? All of us paying a set of subscriptions to the FAANGs, for literally every aspect of our lives.

With what money once everyone is out of a job?

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#102
I think this approach isn't ideal because you're representing pixels as 150x150 unique bins. With only 71k fonts it's likely a lot of these bins are never used, especially at the corners. Since you're quantizing anyways, you might as well use a convnet then trace the output, which would better take advantage of the 2d nature of the pixel data.

This kind of reminds me of dalle-1 where the image is represented as 256 image tokens then generated one token at a time. That approach is the most direct way to adapt a causal-LM architecture but it clearly didn't make a lot of sense because images don't have a natural top-down-left-right order.

For vector graphics, the closest analogous concept to pixel-wise convolution would be the Minkowski sum. I wonder if a Minkowski sum-based diffusion model would work for svg images.

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#103
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's amazing. One of my favorite things to do with copilot is to comment something like "//white arrow pointing right" and then start "<svg" and have it complete it. If it doesn't get it right the first time I update my comment. Saves me time searching for the right SVG and digging through free but really paid image sites.

And it saves you having to credit anyone, win-win!

Awful lot of sites have icons on them. I can't recall ever seeing icon credit. Copilot is like a year old.

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#104

I found a few months ago that the gpt-4 code interpreter is capable of converting a black and white png of a glyph to an svg https://twitter.com/lfegray/status/1678787763905126400 It would be cool to combine a script like the one gpt-4 gave me with an image generation model to generate fonts. The approach from this blog post is way more interesting though. On a separate note it reminds me of this suckerpinch video :)…

>I found a few months ago that the gpt-4 code interpreter is capable of converting a black and white png of a glyph to an svg :) Easy there, let's not make all the naysayers who say it only just predicts plausible words sweat. Your phrasing almost makes it sound like you're sharing a clear example of it analyzing and completing a complex task correctly, while perfectly understanding what it's doing. Perhaps we should…

> Your phrasing almost makes it sound like you're sharing a clear example of it analyzing and completing a complex task correctly, while perfectly understanding what it's doing.

OpenAI has hardcoded (or heavily overfit) several special-purpose functions into their ChatGPT systems. In the past few months, they've integrated other special-purpose models, so their tools can do more than just predictive text (e.g. image recognition).

GPT can do limited verbal reasoning, whatever else can do image recognition, but that does not mean the combined system can do visual reasoning. There's no mechanism by which it would (unless you specifically create one, but that's not trivial and doesn't generalise).

> Who knew that to get results that look like it knows what it's doing, it's enough to predict what could make someone say that!

Everyone. Some call it “specification gaming” or “reward hacking”, and we've known about it for a long time. It's a really obvious concept if you have a good mental model of reinforcement learning. https://doi.org/10.1162%2Fartl_a_00319 is a fun example.

> We are truly living in the golden age of statistical prediction that does not involve any degree of thinking, analysis, or understanding.

This is a straw argument. I can't speak for anyone else, but my criticisms are mainly of people seeing some thinking-like, analysis-like or understanding-like behaviour, and assuming that it is human-like thinking, analysis or understanding, while ignoring other hypotheses (some of which make successful advance predictions in a way the “it's doing what humans do!” models don't).

I will note: the people being the most loudly exuberant about ChatGPT's vast intelligence seem to view it as a tool. If I were faced with an opaque box, inside which was a being capable of general-purpose problem solving, conversation, and original thought, my first reaction would not be “I can use this for my own ends”. I am glad that I have seen nothing to convince me that ChatGPT is such a being, and I have theoretical arguments that ChatGPT probably won't ever be such a being, but if you genuinely think this technology has the potential to produce such a being, you have an ethical responsibility.

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#105

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).

Well, GPT is a general AI.

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“pickled weights”? serious question, how on Earth should someone like me, who has completely missed the last 12 months of AI development, catch up with the state of the art?

I suppose you being here means that you are already fluent in some programming languages. If so, I would start here: Conway & Miles - Machine Learning for Hackers: Case Studies and Algorithms to Get You Started Once you read and understood this, I'd do an online course...

thank you

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#107

I think this approach isn't ideal because you're representing pixels as 150x150 unique bins. With only 71k fonts it's likely a lot of these bins are never used, especially at the corners. Since you're quantizing anyways, you might as well use a convnet then trace the output, which would better take advantage of the 2d nature of the pixel data. This kind of reminds me of dalle-1 where the image is represented as 256 i…

How would the Minkowski sum be used in the diffusion model? Is the idea to look at the Minkowski sum of the prediction and label?

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Font law is almost as complex and fascinating as Tree law. Given how complex font licensing can be, a generative use case that produces usable fonts would be a huge threat to the foundaries and I expect they will be very litigious, just as Getty and others are in the image space.

Tree law? Please say more, sounds interesting

possibly this? https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/tree-law-is-a-gnarly-t...

....“It’s never about the trees,” Bonapart says. “The trees often serve as lightning rods for other issues that are the psychological underpinning of a dispute that people might have with each other.”

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#109

> To train the model, I assembled a dataset of 71k distinct fonts. I give it a week before Monotype sues your face off.

Not this agin /eyeroll It’s not illegal for a human to look through 71,000 fonts and then creat their own. It can’t be illegal for a human to use a robot to look through the fonts for them.

It depends on exactly what is learned from looking through them. If you end up copying shapes and segments then there are possible grounds for a lawsuit. If you’re able to determine the rules to make a good font from your analysis, however, then nothing is stopping you from applying them.

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's amazing. One of my favorite things to do with copilot is to comment something like "//white arrow pointing right" and then start "<svg" and have it complete it. If it doesn't get it right the first time I update my comment. Saves me time searching for the right SVG and digging through free but really paid image sites.

This is such a good idea. Not sure why svg code escaped my mind as something copilot would be good at.

In general, copilots are a massive boon to "boilerplatey", simple syntax languages from XML/HTML to Go.
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