Explaining myself and Mixfont, an AI font generation model

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  • Eko Bimantara
    Eko Bimantara Posts: 12
    I've tried creating a font on the site, and it does seem to be more geared towards "quick-to-create" fonts. I'm hoping to explore more of the generated results to help speed up my font-making workflow, but there are still many obstacles and need lot of addition for it, as discussed. For example, is it possible to have additional tools for refining outlines or adjusting kerning/spacing?

    This refining technicality is important because it needed to achieve specific appropriateness of the work, for example in a text font family; How do you adjust vertical metrics and set up hinting? How about consistency between styles? How about optical balance and type color? In minimum level: How to make the generated extended styles not looks like faux bold? Adjusting all these needs seems difficult using prompts; it's still more comfortable to use hands with the font editor feature.

    There's also concerns about impact of quick-to-create fonts like this site's do: Some people might worry that, not only AI-generated works, but genuine works which is not involving AI, can be "visible" or "labeled" as being AI-generated.

    In automated writing, its easy to make apparently "smart" writtings, but there are often certain language patterns or diction that strongly suggest they're AI-generated. If we take it raw, without editing, by someone who's not used to write and doesn't have a personal expressive language, it's not hard to guess it was created by AI, especially by someone who used to read.

    This font generator also produces similar results. On the one hand, it can generate seemingly complex and well-thought-out letterforms or typographic concepts, but on the other hand it's flawed and needed a lot of refining
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,549
    I should point out that Andrés Torresi is the primary author of the ht Letterspacer project, and he'll present it at the Typographics 2027 TypeLab next week - it's one of those attempts Simon Cozens mentioned. 

    I also want to say that I think it's nice Eric bothered to engage this forum...

    The lack of reckoning with the current and rapidly developing situation at Western type events ha struck me as peculiar. I think it's important that this topic is discussed. 

    First I should preface that... In https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/all-tomorrows-parties/ (the designer famous for cooking and promoting the idea of "responsive web design", iiuc) says that the phrase "what will happen next?" lacks agency, but per "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought" from Langdon Winner in 1977, it's unclear to me we-human-society have any. 

    Back to my point... I believe the majority of computer scientists who developed typefaces generators don't bother; I expect their number to increase exponentially upwards as the difficulty of doing this goes exponentially downwards; and I expect those two trends to continue such that the next 10, 100 Eric's won't post here at all.

    Impallari appears to have been the first. Eric's become second. I hope there'll be a third. 
  • Ray Larabie
    Ray Larabie Posts: 1,489
    edited 3:43PM
    I just want to point out that AI ethics side, all the AI generated typeface results I've seen so far are totally ass. Sure it can do the easy letters...no kidding! Any fool can extrapolate those in their sleep. Look how it botched up the numerals and other hard glyphs. That kind of problem solving is what typeface design is all about, and AI currently doesn't even come close to handling it. Wake me up when it generates something remotely innovative.

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