Discussion

By Jim Hamilton on Apr 05, 2024

Using artificial intelligence to create new fonts brings up a key issue: where does the source data come from? There are two very different ways this could be implemented. In one, the owners of a font library could use their own fonts as the source for creating new and innovative fonts. In another, some outside source gathers font data (perhaps licensed, perhaps not) and does the same thing. This is what bothers me most about AI. Any self-respecting writer will identify their sources. From what I have seen of AI, it doesn't do that. And if you don't know the sources, you don't know anything about the legitimacy of the end result. Is it based on copyrighted materials? Are you going to end up in court if you use AI in this way?

By Joe Treacy on Apr 05, 2024

Frank, that’s quite a fascinating and wide-ranging look into the future, much of which is already upon us in various ways.

That moveabletype.ai can generate a “first draft” can certainly save raw time. But since as you mention, the software is pulling from and recombining pre-existing “content” (other peoples’ IP, more often than not, not necessarily only public domain material), it also creates a situation for the user that’s well beyond just editing.

Since the recombinations can be well beyond what the Fair Use doctrine limits (which can be seen as currently vague), it creates a greater burden of checking against inadvertently plagiarizing others’ copyrighted IP.

(And if one uses software that one knows is basically just scraping from the Web, is any resulting plagiarism missed and published really ‘inadvertent’?)

There are varying degrees of A.I. that can be invoked. Some can be subtle and behind the scenes.

For example, on our treacyfaces.com homepage Interactive Typesampler, we’ve been actively using A.I. since 2010 to help users find and match their ideal font to their client work and their graphic design or web design. A tremendous timesaver for 14 years.

In type design, you’ll recall that by the late ‘70s, the then minicomputer-based Ikarus software introduced digital font interpolation and extrapolation to create new font variations without actually drawing those varieties. The results often required retouching, but it would dramatically shorten the ideation and production cycles. That’s another kind of A.I. that turned out to be very helpful to type designers and to the type-buying market by helping to provide more infinite choice, faster.

An obscure software from the mid-‘90s called Font Chameleon, whose programming could’ve been classed as early A.I., provided users the ability to combine two even distinctly different fonts.

Not that it always produced desirable results, yet it could do the morphing to create something “new”. But it did that using other peoples’ and other companies’ work — any pre-existing fonts it could access.

Just as you’re describing that current A.I. is actually leveraging an internet’s worth of pre-existing other peoples’ and companies’ IP.

And already bringing current lawsuits.

As with a lot of new tools, while the results might be ‘good enough’ for some whose vision is limited, the more that fonts built from tech like that got out into the market, it could be seen that the perceivable quality of those fonts started to dramatically degrade the resulting fonts. That tends to degrade the entire font market in various ways over time as the perceived bar for ‘what’s acceptable’ keeps getting lowered.

Over the 30+ years since the early ‘90s, A.I. influence on typography started small and responded in stages with more benefits.

OS tech add-ons like TrueType GX building on Apple’s QuickDraw GX and combining features from previously different sources and creating font variations. That tech, like Multiple Masters tech from Adobe, set the stage and whetted the appetite for future A.I.-fed advances like today’s OpenType Variable Fonts.

So far in the world of graphic design, digital / web design and packaging today, the communities are mixed so far about the need for A.I. — either much or at all.

Managers (who often tend to have no design training or any sense of good taste or what it means to create truly differentiating, forward-leaning design), are loving the glitter-soaked promise of A.I.

From what I’ve seen and experienced, these tend to be the kinds of managers you see in memes holding the graphic designer’s hand while the designer is holding the mouse — the manager imposing their often misguided or shortsighted design sense, rather than simply letting the designer do their job.

Any current perceived savings that A.I. might offer over a human designer is often significantly skewed by the managers who waste company time and resources trying to impose their perceptions of what ‘the solution’ should be.

This goes on much more often than you might realize.

Just as in the late ‘80s with how the advent of how computers gave managers the perception that ‘all you had to do was push a button and the computer did all the work for you’, we seem to be back at that inflection point again.

Today, graphic designers, art directors and web designers have not been waiting to test the waters with various A.I. like ideating more options faster, comping ads and producing packaging mockups. And sharing their opinions about their A.I. results.

A great example is Burger King’s recent and innovative ‘Not Not A.I. Created.’ ad campaign as a way to open up thinking for their Million Dollar Whopper promotion.

Helping to create more creative options faster is great to toy around with, but in design and marketing, it again creates the great burden on all humans involved creatively and in marketing to be 100% sure that not only are any options chosen not plagiarized, but also truly differentiated. After all, lookalike, soundalike and undifferentiated design and marketing, not to mention plagiarism lawsuits, can all help kill a brand and lose a client very quickly

After all, the A.I. is just deriving from all your competitors’ work that’s already out there.

One has to proceed with caution, and continually weigh whether the expended time and resources truly are worth it, versus humans simply getting together and creating new, original concepts.

Right now is once again a time to very tightly embrace your great designers and support human design and copyrighting creativity vigorously, rather than blindly rush into believing they’re expendable.

Joe Treacy
President & Director of Typography
Treacyfaces.com

By HARVEY LEVENSON on Apr 08, 2024

With regard to Frank Romano’s video, “Artificially Frank,” let’s assume that in the future AI can do everything that writers, graphic designers, and type designers do today. This includes but is not limited to manuscript writing, layout and design, font creation and type selection, selection of appropriate colors, creation of most effective formatting, and so on. Then, what will the future role be of authors and ghostwriters, and graphic designers in the future? The history of technology tells us that once a concept is developed, it is likely that its application will occur in the near to distant future.

For example, in his lauded work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, renowned historian and philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, describes how creative and insightful anomalies that challenge current modes of thinking and execution, eventually come to be accepted by individuals and industries. More specifically, founders of companies, such as Apple and Adobe, as well as laboratories such as the MIT Media Lab (Google: Neil Gershenfeld, When Things Start to Think), and the former Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) are famous for creating, and developing anomalies that have changed the scope of graphics, design, and other applications that have transformed the printing industry. Previously, such technologies were conceived only in science fiction and even comic books, e.g., Buck Rogers, Dick Tracy, and early TV shows such as Captain Video, to name just a few examples. But, here is an anomaly conceived for the printing industry in the 1960s, but never did come to fruition: X-ray printing! How many of you recall this? I’d bet that Frank Romano does!

I’d be interested in what the whattheythink.com readers see as the future role of writers, graphic designers, and type designers, and what these fields will be like as a result of AI.

By Graham Judd on Apr 09, 2024

I think anything created by AI shouldn't have any copyright on it. Possibly it doesn't now.
All copyrighted material should have verification of ownership to a real person.