AI-generated fonts as of Nov 2023

Vasil Stanev

Does anybody have an idea how far AI has progressed in font-generation thus far? Has somebody had to fine-tune such fonts after the AI has finished work?

Christian Thalmann

AI may be fantastically creative, but it's also sloppy. I would expect the benefit for type design to be rather small compared to, say, illustration or copywriting.

Dave Crossland

Personal opinion, not the views of any employer or other organization.

Christian, isn't that because almost everything published so far is bitmap based, so even if it's awesome, it's not getting you any further than any scan of a public domain specimen book? It's a lot of fine tuning to do a revival project, as we all know

I believe there was an innovative approach to getting from bitmaps to vectors in this recent project, which caught legal heat:

https://github.com/SerCeMan/fontogen/issues/1#issuecomment-1747486006

This project just uses out of the box autotracing and the filesize is thus rather high, but I expect that to improve over time - as CJK inherently doesn't have to deal with spacing and kerning automation, and the glyph sets are so large. But kern-on (and others) have shown that's tractable too. So I don't think it's too long before the, er, benefit, is similar to illustration and copywriting. 

https://github.com/TrionesType/zhuque 

As for off the shelf apps, I've seen convincing Latin stuff output from ideogram.ai on a private chat group last week. 

Dave Crossland

https://twitter.com/cgst/status/1723590085625643389

Nice comic book lettering style type here

Dominic Stanley

Not sure where else to post this. I have no problem with AI but it's worth watching if you didn't catch the letter when it came out. Nick Cave responding to a fan who fed his work to chatGPT- read by Stephen Fry https://youtu.be/iGJcF4bLKd4?feature=shared