6 ms·

"Fucking Hell" - first thing I yelled to myself when I saw that headline Kudos for the project, of course, but it just saddens me a bit more. Nothing is sacred

"Fucking Hell" - first thing I yelled to myself when I saw that headline Kudos for the project, of course, but it just saddens me a bit more. Nothing is sacred anymore.

nvy 3y ago
>Nothing is sacred anymore. If it can be specified, it can be automated.
- gigglesupstairs 3y ago
  I know, I know. I am not disputing the technicalities.
colesantiago 3y ago
> Kudos for the project, of course, but it just saddens me a bit more. Nothing is sacred anymore. Why does this sadden you? I'm quite happy everything is being done by AI, time will be freed for other things that are more important. Manual font making will not go away though and now anyone can make their own fonts for free.
- rogerclark 3y ago
  You don't know that the time will be freed for other things that are more important. We don't know for sure how this is all going to work out at all. And people who make fonts, create art, and write prose generally do these things because they like doing them, not because they're forced to. These technologies aren't automating drudgery, they're automating things that give people's lives meaning. What's the endgame here exactly?
  - colesantiago 3y ago
    Time will be freed, ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion has collectively saved countless people billions of hours of time and this will do the same. The big font makers no longer have a hold on extremely pricey fonts that are inaccessible, the general endgame is most software is going free and open source thanks to AI, and that is a good thing.
    - rogerclark 3y ago
      Creatives will have their hopes and dreams stripped away so that artless and tasteless software engineers can type words into a box and instantly get exactly what they want, with no surprises, no feelings, and no economic upsides for anyone else. A beautiful future indeed.
      - axus 3y ago
        Won't the creatives be able to type the software specification into a box, and add functionality to their endeavor without needing programmers? I'm not sure that the process and the paycheck are more important than the final artifact.
        ori_b 3y ago
        Why would we need people to have endeavors? That sounds like automatable drudgery. Won't the AIs be able to infer what would best maximize engagement for their owners and type the specifications necessary to create whatever the entity running them would want their users to consume?
        morph12 3y ago
        Why would we need people? Seems like a pointless bottleneck in the pursuit of efficiency.
      - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
        Designing cereal boxes is not authentic human experssion.
        rogerclark 3y ago
        You must not know any designers. Pretty much everyone I know would consider that to be pretty fun – this is exactly the kind of thing artistic kids say they want to do when they grow up. And most of us would rather get paid to design cereal boxes than to do many other things, and almost everyone would rather do it than to not get paid at all.
  - nvy 3y ago
    >What's the endgame here exactly? All of us paying a set of subscriptions to the FAANGs, for literally every aspect of our lives.
    - aatd86 3y ago
      With what money once everyone is out of a job?
- ori_b 3y ago
  Genuine question: What do you think is more important that won't eventually be done with AI?
rogerclark 3y ago
It's so depressing to think that this is what people want.
- tpmoney 3y ago
  What is that? The ability to quickly and easily generate creative or expressive pieces of computer wizardry without first having to delve into the depths of esoteric knowledge? Of course people want that. It turns out you can’t specialize in everything, but sometimes you just want to be able to make something good enough without having to engage the services of an expert in the field. No this might not be the most beautiful font with the most perfect kerning or optimized code. But if it’s functional enough for the person who requests it, that should be good enough shouldn’t it? Most things people are printing on their 3d printers aren’t high quality designed parts either. Plenty of scientists and accountants have scripts and code that would make most developers cringe, but if it’s good enough then why be bothered? The ability of people to make things with tools that they otherwise never would have been able to make before without dedicating months or years of time they may not have is awesome and we should be excited for it. I’ve watched 70 year old grandmothers learn to make little home movies of their grandkids in iMovie. No they weren’t doing “real” film editing and certainly weren’t learning any skills that would transfer to avid or Final Cut. And so what? That home movie cut together with a minimum of skill and a whole lot of technology hiding the esoterica was probably more meaningful and joy inducing for that woman than most blockbuster cinematics produced by the best minds.
  - rogerclark 3y ago
    Do you wholeheartedly believe this and can you truly not understand why others might be uncomfortable with the direction of generative AI? Defending your viewpoint makes sense, but I don't buy the idea that the other stance is completely incomprehensible. The grandma doesn't need generative fonts. She already has fonts that ship with her phone and computer. She already has iMovie for her grandkid videos. Does she need the ability to generate videos of political figures saying things they didn't say? Obviously, what concerns us is a race to the bottom for the value of all human output.
layer8 3y ago
I mean, looking at the kerning of the second example in particular, there’s still a lot to be done. And something like “extend this latin-1 font to all scripts of the BMP so that is looks stylistically consistent and, within that constraint, the glyphs and their combinations look natural and readable for native readers of each script, assuming Japanese readers for the Han characters” is probably still way off.
- chefandy 3y ago
  Just like all visual generative AI, it gets the first 95% but doesn't get the last 5% that takes 95% of the time. Kerning pairs on typefaces take an incredible amount of human time. Years of full-time work for a large type family. After all these years, even Adobe can't perfectly automate kerning because making letters look right next to each other isn't (obviously) formulaic. Maybe generative AI will nip it in the bud? Certainly hasn't so far, but maybe it will. Obviously in monospaced fonts, like that last one, kerning isn't an issue. More correctable in these models would be the balance between the letterforms. Surely if there was some kind of prompt you could tell it to not make those Ms in that bold serif font to be obnoxiously wide? Either way, as of now, what this gets us is exactly 90% less useful and probably of lower quality than the stuff you can get for free on dafont.com. I know it will progress, but I imagine the best use case for generative AI and font creation for commercially viable fonts would be to give roughs glyphs to fill out a large character set as an aid for a professional type designer. And surely there will be a chorus of people insisting that it doesn't matter. Well, you're wrong. If you blindly showed people a headline, book, poster or whatever with properly kerned type and then one without, they will see how much more polished the properly kerned page is, even if they couldn't tell you specifically why. In a lot of situations, that really, really matters, even to people who haven't developed the ability to point out the differences.
mock-possum 3y ago
‘Anymore’ ha You don’t actually believe anything was ever sacred to being with do you?
waterheater 3y ago
Let's assume the technology will eventually work. What if you had a "personal font"? Sure, you have a user name, but what if you had a custom-generated font which communicates your personality to other people on the Internet? The font could be on a spectrum between static (generated once and reused indefinitely) and dynamic (continuous online learning of personal information causes an adjustment of the font). I'm just making up an example here, but say you're feeling sad, and your smart technology figures out you're feeling sad. When you send a text message to family, then your personal font takes on "sad" characteristics.
- fennecfoxy 3y ago
  That would certainly be cool. I also hope these models, once they're more advanced, help play a role in improving the UX of our software. While a human being decides that on the Youtube app, you can add a video to "watch later", but when it pops up in the feed, there's no option to remove it from "watch later" (except to go to that specific section), I'll be unhappy with human UX. We can only fit so many scenarios on our head I guess. Same thing as a software developer; I do my best, but I'm sure there are bugs that I write in, certain states that I don't end up writing test cases for because I never quite thought of them. If it takes an AI/ML tool to help me be better at this, or to do it for me then I am so keen.
notatoad 3y ago
were fonts ever sacred? monotype has made a whole business off of making helvetica and times new roman alternatives that are basically indistinguishable to the originals but don't require licencing fees. that seems like exactly the sort of business that deserves to be taken over by AI.
fennecfoxy 3y ago
People are always resistant to stuff like this, it's people's jobs and livelihoods after all. However, none of the people in the creative space I see complaining about these models ever cried for: all of the jobs surrounding the horse industry (stables, horseback couriers, etc); thatches roof weavers; textiles weavers; knockeruppers; the people that manually lit street lamps; etc. Of course many argue that industrialisation also created many more jobs, but I certainly suspect there were fewer than it consumed. However the end result is that we are all generally better off for it. I think the reason the argument against machine learning models is flawed is that it is just neo-Luddism; it's hypocritical to complain about the loss of an industry or a specific job, or specific task of a role to technology whilst reaping the benefits of previously lost jobs - artists wear machine woven fabrics, after all; They use technology assembled by pick and place machine - we all do. The big _however_, however, is that we can do better as a society to support transitions like this. We shouldn't stop technology if it has clear benefits for humanity, but unlike previous eras where those who were "replaced by machines" were forgotten, we need to assist and help anybody who is affected by this transition. This is how we should be doing things these days. I find the same argument for train drivers, with the fear of being (rightfully) replaced by self driving trains, a technology that has been available for a long time now. Yes, of course they'd prefer to continue driving trains. But the ability to dramatically lower costs to riders of public transport outweighs this, and companies involved in such transitions (and wider society) need to take care of people involved in such transitions; free cross-training within the same industry, or free training within whatever industry they choose. Financial support through the transition period that their studies take. We can have and eat our silicon cake, we just have to be kind about it.

"Fucking Hell" - first thing I yelled to myself when I saw that headline Kudos for the project, of course, but it just saddens me a bit more. Nothing is sacred anymore.

nvy 3y ago

>Nothing is sacred anymore. If it can be specified, it can be automated.

gigglesupstairs 3y ago
I know, I know. I am not disputing the technicalities.

colesantiago 3y ago

> Kudos for the project, of course, but it just saddens me a bit more. Nothing is sacred anymore. Why does this sadden you? I'm quite happy everything is being done by AI, time will be freed for other things that are more important. Manual font making will not go away though and now anyone can make their own fonts for free.

rogerclark 3y ago
You don't know that the time will be freed for other things that are more important. We don't know for sure how this is all going to work out at all. And people who make fonts, create art, and write prose generally do these things because they like doing them, not because they're forced to. These technologies aren't automating drudgery, they're automating things that give people's lives meaning. What's the endgame here exactly?
- colesantiago 3y ago
  Time will be freed, ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion has collectively saved countless people billions of hours of time and this will do the same. The big font makers no longer have a hold on extremely pricey fonts that are inaccessible, the general endgame is most software is going free and open source thanks to AI, and that is a good thing.
  - rogerclark 3y ago
    Creatives will have their hopes and dreams stripped away so that artless and tasteless software engineers can type words into a box and instantly get exactly what they want, with no surprises, no feelings, and no economic upsides for anyone else. A beautiful future indeed.
    - axus 3y ago
      Won't the creatives be able to type the software specification into a box, and add functionality to their endeavor without needing programmers? I'm not sure that the process and the paycheck are more important than the final artifact.
      - ori_b 3y ago
        Why would we need people to have endeavors? That sounds like automatable drudgery. Won't the AIs be able to infer what would best maximize engagement for their owners and type the specifications necessary to create whatever the entity running them would want their users to consume?
        morph12 3y ago
        Why would we need people? Seems like a pointless bottleneck in the pursuit of efficiency.
    - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
      Designing cereal boxes is not authentic human experssion.
      - rogerclark 3y ago
        You must not know any designers. Pretty much everyone I know would consider that to be pretty fun – this is exactly the kind of thing artistic kids say they want to do when they grow up. And most of us would rather get paid to design cereal boxes than to do many other things, and almost everyone would rather do it than to not get paid at all.
- nvy 3y ago
  >What's the endgame here exactly? All of us paying a set of subscriptions to the FAANGs, for literally every aspect of our lives.
  - aatd86 3y ago
    With what money once everyone is out of a job?
ori_b 3y ago
Genuine question: What do you think is more important that won't eventually be done with AI?

rogerclark 3y ago

It's so depressing to think that this is what people want.

tpmoney 3y ago
What is that? The ability to quickly and easily generate creative or expressive pieces of computer wizardry without first having to delve into the depths of esoteric knowledge? Of course people want that. It turns out you can’t specialize in everything, but sometimes you just want to be able to make something good enough without having to engage the services of an expert in the field. No this might not be the most beautiful font with the most perfect kerning or optimized code. But if it’s functional enough for the person who requests it, that should be good enough shouldn’t it? Most things people are printing on their 3d printers aren’t high quality designed parts either. Plenty of scientists and accountants have scripts and code that would make most developers cringe, but if it’s good enough then why be bothered? The ability of people to make things with tools that they otherwise never would have been able to make before without dedicating months or years of time they may not have is awesome and we should be excited for it. I’ve watched 70 year old grandmothers learn to make little home movies of their grandkids in iMovie. No they weren’t doing “real” film editing and certainly weren’t learning any skills that would transfer to avid or Final Cut. And so what? That home movie cut together with a minimum of skill and a whole lot of technology hiding the esoterica was probably more meaningful and joy inducing for that woman than most blockbuster cinematics produced by the best minds.
- rogerclark 3y ago
  Do you wholeheartedly believe this and can you truly not understand why others might be uncomfortable with the direction of generative AI? Defending your viewpoint makes sense, but I don't buy the idea that the other stance is completely incomprehensible. The grandma doesn't need generative fonts. She already has fonts that ship with her phone and computer. She already has iMovie for her grandkid videos. Does she need the ability to generate videos of political figures saying things they didn't say? Obviously, what concerns us is a race to the bottom for the value of all human output.

layer8 3y ago

I mean, looking at the kerning of the second example in particular, there’s still a lot to be done. And something like “extend this latin-1 font to all scripts of the BMP so that is looks stylistically consistent and, within that constraint, the glyphs and their combinations look natural and readable for native readers of each script, assuming Japanese readers for the Han characters” is probably still way off.

chefandy 3y ago
Just like all visual generative AI, it gets the first 95% but doesn't get the last 5% that takes 95% of the time. Kerning pairs on typefaces take an incredible amount of human time. Years of full-time work for a large type family. After all these years, even Adobe can't perfectly automate kerning because making letters look right next to each other isn't (obviously) formulaic. Maybe generative AI will nip it in the bud? Certainly hasn't so far, but maybe it will. Obviously in monospaced fonts, like that last one, kerning isn't an issue. More correctable in these models would be the balance between the letterforms. Surely if there was some kind of prompt you could tell it to not make those Ms in that bold serif font to be obnoxiously wide? Either way, as of now, what this gets us is exactly 90% less useful and probably of lower quality than the stuff you can get for free on dafont.com. I know it will progress, but I imagine the best use case for generative AI and font creation for commercially viable fonts would be to give roughs glyphs to fill out a large character set as an aid for a professional type designer. And surely there will be a chorus of people insisting that it doesn't matter. Well, you're wrong. If you blindly showed people a headline, book, poster or whatever with properly kerned type and then one without, they will see how much more polished the properly kerned page is, even if they couldn't tell you specifically why. In a lot of situations, that really, really matters, even to people who haven't developed the ability to point out the differences.

mock-possum 3y ago

‘Anymore’ ha You don’t actually believe anything was ever sacred to being with do you?

waterheater 3y ago

Let's assume the technology will eventually work. What if you had a "personal font"? Sure, you have a user name, but what if you had a custom-generated font which communicates your personality to other people on the Internet? The font could be on a spectrum between static (generated once and reused indefinitely) and dynamic (continuous online learning of personal information causes an adjustment of the font). I'm just making up an example here, but say you're feeling sad, and your smart technology figures out you're feeling sad. When you send a text message to family, then your personal font takes on "sad" characteristics.

fennecfoxy 3y ago
That would certainly be cool. I also hope these models, once they're more advanced, help play a role in improving the UX of our software. While a human being decides that on the Youtube app, you can add a video to "watch later", but when it pops up in the feed, there's no option to remove it from "watch later" (except to go to that specific section), I'll be unhappy with human UX. We can only fit so many scenarios on our head I guess. Same thing as a software developer; I do my best, but I'm sure there are bugs that I write in, certain states that I don't end up writing test cases for because I never quite thought of them. If it takes an AI/ML tool to help me be better at this, or to do it for me then I am so keen.

notatoad 3y ago

were fonts ever sacred? monotype has made a whole business off of making helvetica and times new roman alternatives that are basically indistinguishable to the originals but don't require licencing fees. that seems like exactly the sort of business that deserves to be taken over by AI.

fennecfoxy 3y ago

People are always resistant to stuff like this, it's people's jobs and livelihoods after all. However, none of the people in the creative space I see complaining about these models ever cried for: all of the jobs surrounding the horse industry (stables, horseback couriers, etc); thatches roof weavers; textiles weavers; knockeruppers; the people that manually lit street lamps; etc. Of course many argue that industrialisation also created many more jobs, but I certainly suspect there were fewer than it consumed. However the end result is that we are all generally better off for it. I think the reason the argument against machine learning models is flawed is that it is just neo-Luddism; it's hypocritical to complain about the loss of an industry or a specific job, or specific task of a role to technology whilst reaping the benefits of previously lost jobs - artists wear machine woven fabrics, after all; They use technology assembled by pick and place machine - we all do. The big _however_, however, is that we can do better as a society to support transitions like this. We shouldn't stop technology if it has clear benefits for humanity, but unlike previous eras where those who were "replaced by machines" were forgotten, we need to assist and help anybody who is affected by this transition. This is how we should be doing things these days. I find the same argument for train drivers, with the fear of being (rightfully) replaced by self driving trains, a technology that has been available for a long time now. Yes, of course they'd prefer to continue driving trains. But the ability to dramatically lower costs to riders of public transport outweighs this, and companies involved in such transitions (and wider society) need to take care of people involved in such transitions; free cross-training within the same industry, or free training within whatever industry they choose. Financial support through the transition period that their studies take. We can have and eat our silicon cake, we just have to be kind about it.