Hobbyists Discover How To Insert Custom Fonts Into AI-Generated Images (arstechnica.com) 33
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last week, a hobbyist experimenting with the new Flux AI image synthesis model discovered that it's unexpectedly good at rendering custom-trained reproductions of typefaces. While far more efficient methods of displaying computer fonts have existed for decades, the new technique is useful for AI image hobbyists because Flux is capable of rendering depictions of accurate text, and users can now directly insert words rendered in custom fonts into AI image generations. [...] Since Flux is an open model available for download and fine-turning, this past month has been the first time training a typeface LoRA might make sense. That's exactly what an AI enthusiast named Vadim Fedenko (who did not respond to a request for an interview by press time) discovered recently. "I'm really impressed by how this turned out," Fedenko wrote in a Reddit post. "Flux picks up how letters look in a particular style/font, making it possible to train Loras with specific Fonts, Typefaces, etc. Going to train more of those soon."
For his first experiment, Fedenko chose a bubbly "Y2K" style font reminiscent of those popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, publishing the resulting model on the Civitai platform on August 20. Two days later, a Civitai user named "AggravatingScree7189" posted a second typeface LoRA that reproduces a font similar to one found in the Cyberpunk 2077 video game. "Text was so bad before it never occurred to me that you could do this," wrote a Reddit user named eggs-benedryl when reacting to Fedenko's post on the Y2K font. Another Redditor wrote, "I didn't know the Y2K journal was fake until I zoomed it." It's true that using a deeply trained image synthesis neural network to render a plain old font on a simple background is probably overkill. You probably wouldn't want to use this method to replace Adobe Illustrator while designing a document. "This looks good but it's kinda funny how we're reinventing the idea of fonts as 300MB LoRAs," wrote one Reddit commenter on a thread about the Cyberpunk 2077 font.
For his first experiment, Fedenko chose a bubbly "Y2K" style font reminiscent of those popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, publishing the resulting model on the Civitai platform on August 20. Two days later, a Civitai user named "AggravatingScree7189" posted a second typeface LoRA that reproduces a font similar to one found in the Cyberpunk 2077 video game. "Text was so bad before it never occurred to me that you could do this," wrote a Reddit user named eggs-benedryl when reacting to Fedenko's post on the Y2K font. Another Redditor wrote, "I didn't know the Y2K journal was fake until I zoomed it." It's true that using a deeply trained image synthesis neural network to render a plain old font on a simple background is probably overkill. You probably wouldn't want to use this method to replace Adobe Illustrator while designing a document. "This looks good but it's kinda funny how we're reinventing the idea of fonts as 300MB LoRAs," wrote one Reddit commenter on a thread about the Cyberpunk 2077 font.
eight (Score:3)
The news would be ... (Score:2)
... that more and more tasks done by graphic designers can be done by AI and LLMs. Now including Font work. Without even handling a font. This isn't trivial, it actually _is_ news on the AI/LLM/Generator front.
This is water on the mills of my prediction: In roughly a year 90%+ of jobs and tasks in media production will be automated and basically obsolete. And this is only the beginning.
This all is the exact reason I'm 100% knee-deep in a significant career shift away from software development into more huma
Errrm, ... wutt? (Score:2)
So you're a prepper?
Errrm, ... no? (?!?)
I wouldn't call it that.
I'm just enough of an IT expert to recognize when industrialization and automation is moving to make large amounts of jobs in my field obsolete. And preparing for the changes about to impact many of us. If you're in IT you might want to do the same. Perhaps. .. Just sayin'.
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Any thinking person ought to have doubts about the Kennedy assassination. That does not mean it is justifiable to leap to it was some Bush Family/CIA/Federal Reserve led plot as 'the conspiracy nutters' often suggest.
A perfectly simple explanation is that there were just a really embarrassing security failures that were deemed unacceptable to disclose against the backdrop of cold war politics however.
1) Why was the Warren Commission composed almost entirely of persons hostile to Kennedy?
2) Why was the body
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This is water on the mills of my prediction: In roughly a year 90%+ of jobs and tasks in media production will be automated and basically obsolete.
It depends. In the entertainment industry at least, there's certainly more than a few examples of people who are famous because of the connections they made and/or their physical attractiveness rather than actual talent. For example, these are actual lyrics from a Kanye West song:
Poop, poop
Scoop-diddy-whoop
Whoop-diddy-scoop
Whoop-diddy-scoop, poop
LLMs are already to the point where they can write songs quite a bit better than that, but until they can also dance around on stage, real entertainers have nothi
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LLMs are already to the point where they can write songs quite a bit better than that, but until they can also dance around on stage, real entertainers have nothing to worry about.
With lyrics and effort like that, I promise you todays overpriced “entertainers” have plenty to worry about. Won’t take much to re-define what entertainment means for the next generation, and make todays version worthless to them.
AI seems to excel at creativity. That aspect will likely expand and be capitalized regardless if all AI does is become the worlds best artist. At everything artistic.
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You don't need to automate 90% of
If you automated away 10% of all jobs in a field, that would create bloodthirsty competition between the remaining combatants.... er.. employees. Once you hit 20% it's a bloodbath. MBA-think will dominate for some time, it
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Indeed. The reason is that the current AI hype is just as overpromising and underdelivering as the last few ones.
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AI is supposed to be a world changer, yet we clap like seals every time it does something an eight year old could do.
It can do it really fast, and when you have the right model in use it even often gets it right (I've had good results with zzzcode.ai), at least when you break down your problem to single functions so your request is easy to understand and the technical parameters you defined are the core of the prompt message. Sometimes you get to basically jump straight to testing from having the idea instead of having to look up the syntax or exact name of the command. It even writes better SQL queries than I do -- about
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It even writes better SQL queries than I do
Could you please post a little session with prompts and SQL code outputs to illustrate this? I think that would be super informative if you could share such an example.
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The classic example of how immature the output can be is that it will suggest a WHERE clause that runs function calls unnecessarily against every row in a table. Not always, but I've seen it go that route when the SQL statement should have used a pre-calculated parameter. I've also seen it suggest function
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LLMs are a godsend when working with spreadsheets, too. Oh my god, it saves so much time and headache.
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I'm curious how you apply LLM's to spreadsheets.
Like... "computer... create me a cash flow template" ?
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I'm curious how you apply LLM's to spreadsheets.
he could be referencing something like "Retrieval-Augmented Generation", RAG, Nvidia has a free tools (NIM) you can toy around with, after processing your input documents you can "chat with your data".
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It matters for the same reason it matters that generative models can do text in general:
* It's fully integrated into the scene. Follows perspective, maintains appropriate drop shadows / lighting for clarity, makes sure key background elements aren't obscured, and in general adapts *the scene* to the text in a professional manner, not just the other way around.
* It's automated. It's not extra steps, some of which may be slow if you want it look good.
For example, for a project some months bac
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Hobbyists? (Score:3)
Fonts (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sorry but if you think that correctly rendering a font is just a matter of splashing a bitmap over the top of another, or scaling bitmaps to fit the thing you want, then you're wrong.
I guarantee this has absolutely no sense of kerning or anything else that's required to correctly space fonts, before you even get into the fact that most fonts are actually STATE MACHINES, not just bitmaps or even splines.
If you can just splat one bitmap over the other, you could have done that with anything. The bit where AI would actually be quite useful (e.g. rendering a font correctly at low resolution, etc.) it won't stand a chance at.
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I guarantee this has absolutely no sense of kerning or anything else that's required to correctly space fonts
it won't need that to produce acceptable results in the vast majority of cases at a fraction of the cost/effort/skill. indeed generators will never bee 100% reliable because they rely on statistical similaritiy, and there are always cases where mere similarity is not meaningful (think hands with 4 or 6 fingers). in those cases you need actual understanding, a human expert. i guess this varies across domains, but that's often the exception more than the norm. particularly with typesetting, i don't think that
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overkill (Score:1)
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> The point isn't that you can do x small thing without opening Photoshop. The point is you can do a growing number of things without any knowledge of software at all.
That's the WHOLE point of computers -- to automate all the boring shit.
i.e. ImageMagick [wikipedia.org] has been around for ages.
> I once paid bottom dollar to a human to make a logo for my new company. ... Very soon ALL related tasks will be. Now look at the big picture.
You aren't looking at the BIG picture. LLMs are replacing "low effort art" that is
Convincing hand-written notes (Score:2)
what's meaningful here (Score:2)
...it's just another break point in easy ai identification has been passed.
Formerly it was wars, then they got better at rare.
Then it was fingers, then they got better with fingers.
For a while it's been ai's inability to deliver text, now so can make an image of your political opponent with a legible sign.