Google Pics

Dave Crossland
Dave Crossland Posts: 1,570
edited September 2 in Font Technology
(While I am an employee at Google and work on the Google Fonts team, I am posting the below as a member of the public with no special knowledge of anything to do with the below or any involvement; personal opinion only, not a company communication, etc)

pics.google.com just launched

Sizzle video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S18L1NFTda8

I asked it to make a simple postcard, and it offered 4 responses, three of a front and one of a back – and I think this is the first time I've seen the full "post fonts typography" world that we've discussed coming over the horizon on this forum for a few years now, due to the "text editing" feature.

The 'back' of the postcard with "lots" of text is striking since the lettering looks very similar to Pablo Impallari's Caveat typeface (Google Fonts specimen of Caveat), but on close inspection each glyph is slightly unique and therefore, academically defined, is lettering, not type.



I then asked it to give me a couple of Los Angeles inspired type specimens, and this is what I immediate got, exported using the 4x scale up feature:




I wonder what Ray Larabie and John Hudson will make of it, and everyone. 
Tagged:
«1

Comments

  • C.Fransen
    C.Fransen Posts: 23
    I find it difficult not to make a cynical remark.
  • Marc Foley
    Marc Foley Posts: 19
    Mid.

    While it's technically very impressive when we compare it to what AI could previously do, it has no soul and unfortunately falls straight into the slop category. Perhaps it's slop due to the simplicity of your prompts but there's no originality here and it has that unfortunate uncanny valleyesque AI quality to it. Why would I use these fonts over preexisting mid ones?

    Wake me up when AI can one shot something like Klimax, draw a Cyrillic from just a Latin, or generate me a font from Hamburgevons. I'm guessing we're around 2-3 years away from that.
  • Dsche
    Dsche Posts: 14
    edited September 3
    Marc Foley said:
    I'm guessing we're around 2-3 years away from that.
    It seems to me that, in reality, no one has even properly posed the task for AI yet. What we see today under the guise of "artificial letters" is a byproduct, a dust from the polishing of other tasks (images in the broad sense).
    But I would say the potential here is enormous. Artificial lettering impressed me a year ago and continues to do so today.
    Perhaps, when products entirely focused on working with fonts appear, we will achieve the holy grail of truly parametric fonts, when all possible (and some impossible) relationships of thickness, axis inclinations, terminal shapes, and everything else will change with the ease of a breath throughout the font.
    Let's say I've prepared the following inscription:


    Ai transformed it in a second as follows:

    (Yes, this second includes about ten minutes with several iterations of retouching, enlargement, and vectorization, but it still didn't take much time)

    We see a “live” hand, an acceptable imperfection, and at the same time, the font that has appeared before our eyes is stylistically consistent. I find this quite interesting.

    Although I don't like the postcards in the top post either.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,787
    edited September 7
    Hi Dave. Not sure what you’re expecting I might say that I have not already said. The technical quality of the output in terms of cleanness and consistency continues to improve, which I always assumed it would. But it remains uninteresting for all the reasons I have previously stated. Human creativity is about creating humans, not creating things and products. This stuff isn’t contributing anything to human culture, it is just taking from that culture and contributing to the wealth of the billionaire class. I think the better the technology gets, the more starkly evident that is becoming.
    I think AI does have some useful applications, particularly in the area of coding. And one of the reasons I think that is because the creative aspect of software is in the functionality of software —what it does —, not in the lines of code through which it does it. [As an aside, this also throws into relief my oft-repeated point about where value resides in software, and why treating code as a literary work for copyright purposes is dumb. You buy a book to read the text; you don’t buy a software license to read the code.]
    Earlier this week, someone showed me the app he had made with Claude to help him run his business, and it was very impressive: it did all the things he wanted it to do in the ways in which he wanted them done, and is something that wouldn’t have existed otherwise because he wouldn’t have had enough money to pay someone to write that software, and if he had to use someone else’s app or service it would not have worked the way he wanted.
    I don’t think making pretty pictures over which you have effectively no control is even in the same realm, despite employing similar AI models behind it. It may become more interesting if/when the user can start instructing the AI agent how to edit aspects of the image — including the text in the image — in quite precise ways that do not suffer from the instability inherent in the current AI generation. That implies tools that are a lot more directly interactive than text prompts: at some stage, you need to be able to point at something and say ‘Change that bit there’, rather than trying to describe in words what you want changed. [AI agents are often presented as being like assistants sitting beside you to help you with tasks, but can you imagine trying to communicate with a human assistant only via text prompts without being able to use your hands?] If AI provided that precise kind of control, it would be functioning more like a tool — like a pen or a paintbrush or a chisel —, and then it would be something through which human creativity could find expression.
    on close inspection each glyph is slightly unique and therefore, academically defined, is lettering, not type
    Ironically, this is an effect I am seeking in a project I am working on, but of course what I want this variation in lettering applied to is some letterforms I have made myself, so having AI be able to generate what it thinks I want based on something it was fed from the Internet remains useless.
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,570
    edited September 3
    Stephen:

    I didn't hope for this, and wasn't aware it was happening any sooner than anyone else in the public... I'm not involved it in any more than self driving cars. It is happening, and I think it's important to discuss it happening despite us all here having no agency in it.

    We have been having threads like this for a few years. Every 6 months? And I've been, I hope, fairly clear about what I think: This is the biggest change in visual communication since the introduction of PostScript around the time I was born in the early 80s, and it's important to me to have a clear understanding of what is happening, which I think only comes from forum discussion/debate like this, and which is why I have participated in these threads and started this one.

    Each cycle the output gets better, and it seems the trend will continue. I forsee the future is one in which fonts become more and more an obsolete and unused technology. Personally on some level this isn't good news, but I want to know what is happening.

    Ray and John have been evaluating these systems more than I have, and have a better sense than me about the rate of improvement. Maybe this iteration is a dud, no real change in output except for the editing which John and I had discussed maybe 2 years ago. To me it looks like a step up in quality, detail, maybe even originality. I'll continue to play with it. 

    Last time the thread was started by a previously unknown developer who appeared to put together stock components wired all the way through to generate OpenType files; this time it's one of the tech mega corporations doing it as a stand alone app that's image file output only. Neither are making OpenType files obsolete just yet, by themselves. 

    The next milestone I'm seeing ahead is when Adobe and Canva and Microsoft - and Google - each get around to putting generated lettering directly into their document authoring applications. I don't think that will be unique or novel. The editable text of Google Pics is a step towards that which I haven't seen before. 

    v-fonts.com/support shows 10 years of disinterest in variable fonts from Microsoft, Apple and Google's officeware teams, but I expect these image generation systems to be integrated in all such authoring apps over time, and from there is a small step to use them to do typography.

    To Marc's point, asking "why would I use these fonts over preexisting mid ones?" presupposes your agency on choosing letter style; what I see happening is that the nature of the large language models is that they process the linguistic context of documents very well such that they also automate type selection, and so the reason your document doesn't ever touch an OpenType file is that you type in your content - be that a short prompt to expand or a long draft to condense, or use as is - and transform it from text to document, and you obtain a satisfactory result, and go on with the rest of what you were doing.


  • Kris Sowersby
    Kris Sowersby Posts: 55
    edited September 3
    Congratulations, Dave. You’ve helped create the world’s largest font training data set. From your humble beginnings railing against the evils of the commercial type industry to now staring at your own obsolescence at the hands of your magnanimous employer, it’s been quite the journey! 
  • Maurice Meilleur
    Maurice Meilleur Posts: 64
    What, exactly, would be the advantages of typography without type? Explain it to me like I’m seven.

    And, incidentally: raising the issue of how designers frame their ‘agency’ when they evaluate the operation and output of chat-based, generative models manifestly and intentionally designed by their developers to relieve them of agency makes me feel like I’m having a stroke.
  • Simon Cozens
    Simon Cozens Posts: 868
    Kris Sowersby said:
    Congratulations, Dave. You’ve helped create the world’s largest font training data set. 
    Bigger than DaFonts? Bigger than 100000_FONTS_WAREZ.zip? Yeah, nah.
  • Roel Nieskens
    Roel Nieskens Posts: 218
    As an observation, from what I've seen in flyers for small events around town, birthday cards and images sent in WhatsApp groups, I don't think any of those people cared about exact letter forms, lettering vs. fonts, contributing to human culture, etc. But I think everybody here already knows that.

    So that this will find an audience, I'm sure, regardless of my feelings about it.

    What I wonder about though, while for this usecase I understand people won't (want to) work straight with font files anymore. But proper documents? Will business documents, letters, reports, etc. all become a stream of lettered JPGs? That will be completely repainted with each resize or edit?
  • C.Fransen
    C.Fransen Posts: 23
    edited September 4
    Roel Nieskens said:
    But proper documents? Will business documents, letters, reports, etc. all become a stream of lettered JPGs? That will be completely repainted with each resize or edit?

    A bit off topic, but I think it will end up as a more hybrid form; A font file(s) as a solid base for corporate identity and Ai used as add-on to create 'illustrations/typographic variations'. This way it'll keep its consistency but will have the flexibility Ai offers. It'll be far more environmentally friendly and, I think, less costly than re-creating each document over and over as an image. Ai won't be a free service forever I guess.

    What I'm more concerned about is the effect Ai will have on new type designers. I'm afraid growth (read new arrivals) will dry up in the end. The new arrivals depend on those flyers, invitations etc. Replacing them in this stage by Ai will scare them off resulting in eroding the craft. This will have extending consequences in the long term. Sadly.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,787
    edited September 7
    I definitely think there will be an audience for this sort of thing, even an audience willing to pay for subscriptions or tokens to be able to churn this stuff.
    It is worth considering where the efficiency lies. In being able to generate images including text, the efficiency is in not requiring a human being to develop skills and then spend time applying those skills. The machine can do it faster. But that doesn’t mean that outputting bitmap images of text is in itself more efficient than using a font. At the moment, AI image models are bitmap focused, but if we start to imagine native vector AI graphic environments, where the machine is actually drawing shapes with Bézier or other outline formats, then using typfaces — prefabricated letter collections with built-in layout data — could be as much an efficiency gain as it was in AD 1450. The format might not be OpenType as we currently know it, but could very easily still be some flavour of sfnt.
  • C.Fransen
    C.Fransen Posts: 23
    @John Hudson  Where does the type designer fit in, in this scenario?
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,178
    edited September 5
    Ready-made fonts (what we think of today as fonts) can be used by either machines or humans.

    Machines can use the ready-made fonts as is. Or they can use existing ready-made fonts as models to create their own lettering, as we are seeing with Google Pics.

    For creating ready-made fonts… I expect the machines to soon get pretty good at expanding character sets, given some good inputs. This is nice insofar as it is more the “centaur” model where the machine serves us, rather than the other way around (the “reverse centaur” situation, which sucks). A human type designer can make a base font or a bunch of key characters and get the machine to expand on that. Maybe even work closely with the machine to reduce some of the drudgery.

    Less fun is the scenario where machines generate the lettering, as in Google Pics, by using existing fonts as inputs. (And the same thing for machines generating fonts, of course.) This is concerning not only because the quality and creativity may be lacking, but also because it may eventually get into the problem of the machines eating their own output (or you may have a less complimentary name for it) and a degenerating quality spiral. Ugh.

    The last might be better than I hope. I think research into it is interesting. I hope the results continue to get better and do not hit a wall or death spiral. (I say that because I think it is going to happen whether I will it or no, so I would prefer it suck less.)
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,787
    Oh, I really, really want to see that ‘Cyrillic’, Ray.
  • Peter Constable
    Peter Constable Posts: 292
    I'm curious: When mechanical printing was introduced in Europe (or elsewhere), were there professional scribes who considered what they did in producing manuscripts as having qualities and intrinsic "creative" value that was missing in the outputs of mechanical printing? Both manuscripts and printed sheets could convey information, though printing could generate artefacts faster and less expensively; but was something of important value compromised?
  • Dan Reynolds
    Dan Reynolds Posts: 186
    edited September 6
    I don’t know about scribes themselves but in 1492, the (controversial) abbot Johannes Trithemius wrote a book in praise of scribes, though it was distributed in print. I’m not sure how much Trithemius was bothered by type; it was the whole process that he questioned. Here is a small snippet, in translation. His prediction did not entirely come to pass:

    “The printed book is made of paper and, like paper, will quickly disappear. But the scribe working with parchment ensures lasting remembrances for himself and for his text.”
  • Kris Sowersby
    Kris Sowersby Posts: 55
    So let’s imagine a system within which AI typographic models are able to precisely and persistently present text in specific typefaces, such that a user can say as part of a magazine layout prompt ‘Set the article titles in Financier Display’ (or maybe the machine already knows that this is the house style for the publication). That implies a few necessary things. One is that the machine is actually able to accurately present the identified text in that particular typeface, and is able to do so repeatedly and without changing anything about it while other aspects of the layout are adjusted by further prompts. Another, of course, is that there has to be some way in which Kris Sowersby makes some money from that use of his typeface.
    This is extremely unlikely to happen. There is next to zero chance of money flowing from these god awful systems to people like us that make things. The most likely thing will be, “set the article titles in something like Financier Display”. This will circumvent copyright, licensing problems any need to distribute money back into the creative ecosystem from which they’ve so thoroughly plundered.

    Of course, if this happens then OP will be out of a job… because Google can simply self-populate its font catalogue with no real need for actual craft. 
  • Craig Eliason
    Craig Eliason Posts: 1,521
    @John Hudson Do you think that “massive surge” of “new styles of writing” was motivated in some measure by scribes trying to stay ahead of typefounders, trying to preserve the value of their practice? Or perhaps the specialized document types were mostly one-offs that had little to gain from the economies of scale offered by type. 
  • Eko Bimantara
    Eko Bimantara Posts: 13

    I’ve been following AI discussions with interest, and I think there is another side that may be worth exploring in the area that AI helps building tools. I'm not sure that sharing this worth a new discussion post, so please let me off topic a bit in response to John Hudson said:

    I think AI does have some useful applications, particularly in the area of coding. And one of the reasons I think that is because the creative aspect of software is in the functionality of software —what it does —

    I’m not a programmer, my knowledge in programming language is zero. But now, I can and have been intensly for the past two months, experimenting with AI-assisted coding to build a typographic tool of my own. What surprised me is not so much what AI can generate visually, but what it allows someone without a software-development background to actually make.

    The tool I’m working on, I called it Typefex, is basically an experimental playground for manipulating typography. Bring in type or text and work with it through different processes. These process, which still been expanding and optimizing—are; Halftone, dithering, raster structures, stippling, edge tracing, broken (bad photocopy, ink bleed and others), charcoal, spray, structural deformation, contour manipulation, and more.

    Here's link of a video of me using the tools:

    https://www.kapwing.com/videos/6a9dffd2b233724a9b658aea

    Here's the result of some typefaces which I've made with this tool. Creating one, generally, takes less than half an hour. Its a derivative from already existing fonts, which is my own fonts:


    What interests me is that I still hold the control of the design decisions. I decide what the effect should do, how it should behave, what looks wrong, what needs to be rebuilt, which parameters are useful, and what kind of result I want. AI helps me translate those ideas into working software, then I test it visually, reject things, change the logic, and iterate.

    Some of what I’m doing may already be possible in Photoshop, Illustrator, or other existing applications. These processes are not entirely new. The difference, for me, is that they often require multiple steps, combinations of effects, workarounds, or techniques that take time to learn and reproduce.

    Now I can take those scattered processes, simplify them, combine them, and then elaborate on them specifically from a typographic point of view. Something that might normally require ten steps across several tools can become a single effect with a few meaningful controls. And once that basic process exists, I can push it further—asking what happens if it reacts differently to edges, counters, stroke weight, small details, or other characteristics that matter specifically to type.

    I think this is the interesting possibilities for AI in typography, not “generate me a typeface.” But: “help me build the typographic instrument I wish existed.”

    And perhaps this could go even further. AI might make it normal for me—and for many of us working in type and typography—to have our own tools, built around our own particular ways of thinking and making.

    Most of us use roughly the same set of software. We may use those tools very differently, but the tools themselves are largely designed for everyone. Now, someone might easily create an instrument for a visual idea that is difficult to achieve with any existing software. These tools wouldn't necessarily need to become commercial products. Some might be extremely personal—made for one designer, one process, or even one project, it might also become very specific for one's artistic or typographic language.

  • Floor van Steeg
    Floor van Steeg Posts: 23
    Qwerasd said:

    I'm just so tired of seeing people say "well AI is bad when used for my field of expertise/interest, but it's actually good if I use it for this other thing that I know little about but I find it useful for".
    Thank you for saying this. (Current) AI is just as good in programming as it is in creating the cards from OP. It works, it's fine for many. Experts will see the difference.
  • Simon Cozens
    Simon Cozens Posts: 868
    Qwerasd said:
    The code that AI produces is often hideous and harebrained, but unfortunately, it's good enough; it produces things that work, even if they're inefficient and the code quality is awful.

    I agree with you on this. But good enough is good enough. People don't want beautiful, efficient code; they want to solve a problem. I find photography a good analogy. There will always be professional photographers who have good training, good experience and good gear. If you want to take professional-level photos, those three things are what you need and professional photographers will not be put out of job by people who do not have them. But if you just want a picture of your auntie's cat, a point-and-shoot is perfectly adequate and I wouldn't shame anyone for using one.

    (I'm aware of the "generated code is unmaintainable!" argument, often made by people who forget what happens when you come back to a human-coded codebase after a few months away...)

Categories