Visual Editor Picsart Launches AI-Powered Font Generator

Picsart is tapping artificial intelligence to expand the range of fonts it offers. The photo and video editing platform announced a new collection of typefaces created entirely through generative machine learning. The company eventually plans to add the ability for users to produce their own based on sets of text descriptors. The tool is the latest example of how research advances that have given artificial intelligence more creative ability in recent years have begun to find their way into graphic design and editing software. Amazon-owned Twitch previously experimented with AI-generated emojis for its video streaming chat function, while a host of smaller services have popped up to offer automated font generation as well. AI Tool Shows How Machine Learning Could Make Video Editing More Efficient Picsart said the idea for the tool began at an internal hackathon and eventually grew into a bigger initiative. It currently encompasses about 30 AI-generated fonts accessible to paid subscribers of Picsart's premium tier with plans to add more monthly. "Font is one of the most requested features in Picsart. Users are using fonts to express themselves together with the picture editing to create text images," said Humphrey Shi, chief scientist at Picsart's AI Research lab. "So the need for font is really huge." The fonts are created by training an AI model on a large dataset of existing fonts with keywords and descriptor tags inputted to guide the aesthetics of the generated product. The machine learning model then produces thousands of glyphs, which are subsequently sorted into vectorized images using further quality control algorithms. Picsart raised $130 million in 2021 to push the decade-old startup's valuation north of $1 billion. The company has been investing heavily in AI-powered creative tools aimed at expanding the range of graphic and audio building blocks it offers users to create content. The company launched an AI music generator last year that produces royalty-free backing tracks instantaneously, as well as a tool that taps AI to quickly edit photo backgrounds. "Picsart's goal is to empower the creator in all of us—people with the design knowledge and with a lot of expertise in art and expression, but also the regular people," Shi said. "And to do that, essentially, AI is the ultimate solution. Because to make it easy to use without much domain expertise in editing and design, you need some powerful AI to help the user to achieve what they want." Meet the Women Working to Make Artificial Intelligence a More Equitable Space