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Jonathan Hoefler on type ai (on threads)
Dave Crossland
Posts: 1,394
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1. Totally AI generated fonts (fonts-on-the-fly): Free and ubiquitous, likely of dubious quality (to begin with) but won't deter most consumers. Not a good outcome for type designers.
2. AI as a co-pilot to do the heavy lifting in type design - 'make the bold', 'give me options for a true italic', sort of thing. Great outcome for type designers.
Are there other outcomes that have a comparable level of consensus?
Will AI inevitably revert to option 1, even in a utopian outcome?
* You don’t have to try too hard to imagine that because I think I’m describing what scribes did.
I also agree with your last sentence!
Now more than ever, good taste, judgement, and craft must steer the use of the technology. AI is already democratising design, so professionals must set the bar high as an example for enthusiasts. I feel it's our duty as designers to ensure that AI is steered not just toward improving efficiency but more importantly the quality of our work.
The particular advancement I'm referring to is training individual GPTs in ChatGPT, which was introduced this month. I believe there's a potential for linking these trained specialists together to consistently perform more complex tasks. You can think of the old model as being one smart, talented individual that can do everything and the new model as an office full of smart, talented specialists. When they linked together, they will act more like a company rather than an individual. Therefore, it would be simpler to have a full-time specialist adept at writing in a particular style, than storing a set of fonts.
Edit: I apologize for the length of this message, but I want to highlight that users can now make individual GPTs, including those skilled in visual tasks, publicly accessible. For instance, ChatGPT Plus members can access a GPT specialized in transforming faces into Simpsons characters. Envision a future tool capable of producing lettering, potentially leading to a new font market. Here, instead of crafting fonts in an editor, typeface designers would essentially train AI scribes. Modern type designers and typographers would produce the most talented of these scribes, with companies valuing quality and consistency in typography willing to pay for access to them.
The chat gpt stuff just seems like a gui for making a long initial prompt that's properly structured, given the very long prompt length now possible in the general model?
You're correct, the instances which OpenAI calls “GPTs” are similar to using a long initial prompt. The main difference is that GPTs can have their own linked documents. For example, you can load text, PDFs, spreadsheets, photos, or other documents and instruct the GPT to use them as reference. Unlike the long initial prompt technique, you don't need to keep reminding it to stay on track. You can also modify the instructions later.
What Pablo and others have shown is that machine learning can produce pastiches of a wide range of things that have already been created by humans. Some things are more obviously pastiches, because what they mimic are idiosyncratic or personal, strongly identified with an individual human voice, while others are less obviously so because they mimic culturally broad and conventional works. I think Tschichold’s two modes of work do provide a useful way of thinking about this difference, not least because he identified the difficulty of the earlier mode: it wasn’t easy to do well and required a specific intelligence or feeling, while the later ‘classical’ mode could be accomplished by anyone with basic typesetting skills following a set of rules or models. Since the latter mode embodies those models, mimickry of that style of typography is indistinguishable from following the models, so machine learning looks like actual learning (understanding of concepts and principles, rather than mere repetition), while mimickry of Tschichold’s modernist work will look like stylistic pastiche, without any evidence of understanding. Arguably, that is in a sense more ‘honest’, since it doesn’t give the impression of intelligence.
Imagine giving an AI prompts that reference dada or surrealism. It will easily return pastiches of Duchamp or Dali—predictably, the better known artists associated with those movements—, but it won’t understand anything about dada or surrealism, so won’t have any conceptual means to apply the ideas of dada or surrealism in new ways. And I chose dada and surrealism as examples because, like Tschichold’s early modernist work, they are concerned with the unexpected—hence unpredictable—and with challenging conventional associations—hence non-probablistic.
Personally, and with no special insight, I think you are going to be surprised how good the current generation of Eliza systems will get at producing what looks like abstract conceptual reasoning and doing things we would say are new if a person did them
It’s a step too far, as if the previous generation of digital technology hasn’t already proven to be a disaster for humanity.
It’s not about the quality of technology, but the asymptotic the rate of change, way too fast for us to mitigate, via legislation and adaptation, the disruption it causes.
And yet still we think more of the same will fix the problems it causes. Duh.
As a type designer, I am continuing to explore a feature of “old” tech — the contextuality of OpenType, and will have nothing to do with AI. Although I will no doubt be forced to use it, one way or another, by the planned obsolescence of automatic software upgrades, or become excluded from society.