Mixfont Update - seeking a designer to help complete an AI-generated font

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Comments

  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,578
    I am an employee of Google USA, in the font development lead role on the Google Fonts team, and this is personal opinion not an official company statement
    Man, this is depressing. I can't imagine what it must be like to moderate these submissions.
    I think this is a typical arms race situation, where the AI-powered creation/submissions are to be met with AI-powered moderation/reviews, just as how upon receiving a 12 page email written by an LLM based on a one paragraph prompt, email clients then produce a 1 paragraph summary...


  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,829
    Hilarious.
  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 109
    That sounds like turbo-accelerated enshittification. Why not simply ban AI-generated submissions? The quality is abysmal, people who do the submissions have no idea how to take on feedback, since they have no idea about what they produced. This is futile.
  • David Sargent
    David Sargent Posts: 7
    edited October 8
    I think this is a typical arms race situation, where the AI-powered creation/submissions are to be met with AI-powered moderation/reviews, just as how upon receiving a 12 page email written by an LLM based on a one paragraph prompt, email clients then produce a 1 paragraph summary...
    I hope it doesn't come to this. A lot of the submissions meet the technical requirements (i.e. all the required glyphs and Fontbakery ticks) but are poorly drawn and assembled, especially diacritic handling and any glyphs outside of the Latin Core glyphset. See Exhibit A from a recent submission.

    But perhaps Google has access to this new 'super' intelligence (lol) that is capable of pointing out the mistakes of plain old artificial intelligence. 


  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,201
    edited October 8
    SCarewe said:
    The quality is abysmal, people who do the submissions have no idea how to take on feedback, since they have no idea about what they produced. This is futile.
    That has certainly been true so far.

    But it is entirely plausible that quality will get better in the near future. So “not looking at them” seems like a bad choice if one wants to know how things are going.

    I made one incredibly wrong background assumption when I prognosticated about this a year ago, at last year’s Fonts & AI conference: I figured that the folks investing in AI generated fonts would have somebody involved who had expertise in type design and font quality. For everything that has rolled out in the western world so far… that seems to have been false. What a huge handicap that is for the developers! (I expect Chinese and Japanese may be further along... may learn more in the next couple of days.)

    I mean, yes we are seeing a bunch of AI-generated western fonts. It took a little longer than I estimated (I said “within six months”). But I am blown away… by the lack of quality.

    That doesn’t mean things won’t improve. I fully expect that. TBD how much so, and how fast.
  • David Sargent
    David Sargent Posts: 7
    I figured that the folks investing in AI generated fonts would have somebody involved who had expertise in type design and font quality. 
    We've come full circle back to the original post 😅.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,201
    Not at all. Eric is asking somebody to fix up a single font, so he can get it accepted as “the first AI font in Google Fonts.” Nothing he has written about it suggests to me that this is an effort to improve his  production chain. Genuine feedback on that has… not gotten any response.
  • jeremy tribby
    jeremy tribby Posts: 298
    edited 2:47AM
    Thomas Phinney said:
    SCarewe said:
    The quality is abysmal, people who do the submissions have no idea how to take on feedback, since they have no idea about what they produced. This is futile.
    That has certainly been true so far.

    But it is entirely plausible that quality will get better in the near future. So “not looking at them” seems like a bad choice if one wants to know how things are going.
    I disagree with this. it's clear they'll get better, possibly indistinguishable from human-made work, but that skips the more salient half of sebastian's point RE: people not knowing what they're producing. fonts are more than a set of vector drawings and metadata encapsulated in an OTF file, the end result isn't the full story, and AI-generated marketing won't fill that gap either. people dedicate their lives to this craft, and if I were a distributor, especially one with as much brand equity to lose as Google Fonts, I should want to be a gatekeeper, and to not become known as a cesspool by evaluating the work of those who do not have a craft involved in their process. an AI-native Cesspool Fonts (or Mixfont, or whatever it ends up being called) will move faster than Google anyway...

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