
Organizing the world of fonts with AI - brudgers
https://medium.com/ideo-stories/organizing-the-world-of-fonts-with-ai-7d9e49ff2b25
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nerdponx
This is really fun and interesting work, but it also goes to show how diluted
the term/buzzword "AI" really is.

This is barely even machine learning (what exactly is being "learned" here?).
5 years ago this would have been "dimension reduction and clustering".

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photoJ
Dimension reduction and clustering have long been the focus of AI/ML.
Reference, Bishops book an early 2000's classic, Pattern Recognition and
Machine Learning, chapter 9.1 is k-means clustering.

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azinman2
People started using machine learning as a term to differentiate the goal from
actual intelligence. They're not the same. Early work in AI was generally
about achieving goals (aka A*, blocks world, etc), which is not the same thing
as dimensionality reduction or clustering.

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brudgers
Russell and Norvig (1995) include machine learning as one of the four elements
needed to pass the Turing Test. They cite Gold's _Identification of Language
in the Limit_ from 1967 as a laying the groundwork for machine learning
applied to natural language processing.

[http://stpk.cs.rtu.lv/sites/all/files/stpk/materiali/mi/arti...](http://stpk.cs.rtu.lv/sites/all/files/stpk/materiali/mi/artificial%20intelligence%20a%20modern%20approach.pdf)

[http://web.mit.edu/~6.863/www/spring2009/readings/gold67limi...](http://web.mit.edu/~6.863/www/spring2009/readings/gold67limit.pdf)

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singham
I had seen a similar research project by people from Microsoft. They had
mapped fonts onto a higher dimensional data. Then you can generate new fonts
on the fly by specifying a new point and getting a font for that.

[https://github.com/erikbern/deep-fonts](https://github.com/erikbern/deep-
fonts)

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tyingq
I'm surprised it was all driven solely by rendering a single word
"handgloves". The diagram hints that it might have even been an all-caps
"HANDGLOVES". I wonder if the results would have been better with a longer
phrase that included other characters, or some mix of lower/upper case.

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haddr
Very nice and promising thing. I would suggest performing a second iteration
with the following improvements:

\- classify on all characters (not only one word)

\- add some more fonts, at least those most popular ones. I tried with a few
very popular (i'd say classic) fonts, but none was found

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ryanmarsh
I would imagine most designers would prefer to see something like "RSOgfcq" if
they're font surfing. An 'A' conveys so little about a typeface.

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azinman2
Doing that forces you to focus on the trees instead of the forest. If you use
an actual English word then you can compare gestalts, which is typically more
important. That allows you to understand the emotional impact, etc.

