State of the art in AI font generation — Simon Cozens

Thomas Phinney

I am super impressed with this article from Simon Cozens explaining where AI font generation is currently at, with tons of references.

Yes, this is aside from whether any of this is a good idea, ethical, or the copyright and design patent situation for “AI-generated” fonts. Those are all totally reasonable discussions to have, which we are having elsewhere. But I think it is also useful to understand what has already happened, and what is likely to happen.

Some highlights:

• The China/Japan vs rest-of-world differences are fascinating — both how far things are along for ideographs, and how much of a gap there still is on the alphabetic side.
• What even is AI font generation is a question. Does one mean generating a complete font from a text description, or from an initial sample, or what?
• What are the different AI technologies being used, and their strengths and weaknesses? Which ones seem to be dead ends or impractical, and why?
• There is often a critical gap being able to generate images of font glyphs, vs vector font glyphs.