Hobbyists Discover How To Insert Custom Fonts Into AI-Generated Images

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last week, a hobbyist experimenting with the new Flux AI image synthesis model discovered that it's unexpectedly good at rendering custom-trained reproductions of typefaces. While far more efficient methods of displaying computer fonts have existed for decades, the new technique is useful for AI image hobbyists because Flux is capable of rendering depictions of accurate text, and users can now directly insert words rendered in custom fonts into AI image generations. Since Flux is an open model available for download and fine-turning, this past month has been the first time training a typeface LoRA might make sense. That's exactly what an AI enthusiast named Vadim Fedenko (who did not respond to a request for an interview by press time) discovered recently. 'I'm really impressed by how this turned out,' Fedenko wrote in a Reddit post. 'Flux picks up how letters look in a particular style/font, making it possible to train Loras with specific Fonts, Typefaces, etc. Going to train more of those soon.'

For his first experiment, Fedenko chose a bubbly 'Y2K' style font reminiscent of those popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, publishing the resulting model on the Civitai platform on August 20. Two days later, a Civitai user named 'AggravatingScree7189' posted a second typeface LoRA that reproduces a font similar to one found in the Cyberpunk 2077 video game. 'Text was so bad before it never occurred to me that you could do this,' wrote a Reddit user named eggs-benedryl when reacting to Fedenko's post on the Y2K font. Another Redditor wrote, 'I didn't know the Y2K journal was fake until I zoomed it.' It's true that using a deeply trained image synthesis neural network to render a plain old font on a simple background is probably overkill. You probably wouldn't want to use this method to replace Adobe Illustrator while designing a document. 'This looks good but it's kinda funny how we're reinventing the idea of fonts as 300MB LoRAs,' wrote one Reddit commenter on a thread about the Cyberpunk 2077 font.

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