Hi All,
Last year I heard a talk about AI and type by
@Filip Paldia, who's PHD subject is "Making Aesthetically Acceptable Fonts by Deep Learning Methods". It made me step back a while to consider what on earth was going to happen to our industry and even whether I should keep going or pivot into something else (type design is already my third design career, and I love it).
After reading the insightful posts on TypeDrawers, especially this thread:
https://typedrawers.com/discussion/comment/64337/ , and chatting with type friends, I eventually came to the conclusion that AI will certainly disrupt the industry but not destroy it. In fact it will play a critical role in its evolution beyond 'static type' much like
@Ray Larabie suggested.
I reached out to Filip and we co-authored this article. It's aimed more at graphic designers, but would be interested to hear your thoughts, even if it's a load of old codswallop*.
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2024/01/ai-dilemma-graphic-design-typography/*yes, 'Codswallop' the font name is already taken, like everything else, I just checked.
Comments
GPT-4 Turbo did, however, make this attractive but totally random and meaningless image when Adam Twardoch tried to use it to help me find a test word for Sinhala shaping behaviours.
Which makes me think that deep language models might not actually recognise the boundaries of language.
Love that GPT image!
As I have written elsewhere, I also have concerns about the directions of current AI with regard to non-Latin text. Yes, as Dave has pointed out, the handling of English text in AI generated graphics is getting better pretty rapidly (but still inserts unneeded letters, is often badly spaced, sometimes inconsistent, or simply degraded—all seen in the labels in that GPT image), but there is a pattern in North American-driven tech developments of ignoring the needs of the text needs of rest of the world until long after English text has been solved, and of solving English text needs in ways that actively disadvantage users of other languages and writing systems. As one of my Indian colleagues put it with regard to OpenType, every time US tech giants introduce a new technology, ‘the clock gets reset’ for everyone else.
[The current AI hype also reminds me too much of the dotcom bubble in the 1990s, so I think there is a greater than 50% chance of this generation of the technology becoming an investment sinkhole that we’ll have to ride out before we end up with something useful.]