Screenshot by Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET
Do you remember the joy of doodling or tinkering with (the now vintage) Microsoft Paint or WordPad tools when you were younger? Google’s new artificial intelligence (AI) experiment granted me nearly the same experience 20 years later.
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If you go to Google Labs, you will spot a new addition to its experiments — GenType Alphabet Creator. With the tool, you can use Imagen 2 to generate AI images for all 26 alphabet letters from a single prompt.
The genesis for this experiment was when a Google employee wanted to use Imagen to help his children learn the alphabet visually by generating letters from familiar objects. Even though I can see the value in using the tool for children’s learning, as an adult without children, I found a different use — entertainment.
This tool is fun because you can make endless words and sentences from one prompt. You can go further down the rabbit hole and create more generations with new prompts.
All the letters generated have slight differences. Imagen 2 runs each letter’s generation separately and tweaks the design according to your prompt. Still not getting the hype? Let me show you the tool in action.
First, visit the Google Labs page for GenType and sign in to your Google account. You can now start tinkering by typing words into the textbox on the left that describe what you want your alphabet letters to look like.
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To get the best results, Google suggests including three different components: what you want to see in the generation’s foreground (the letter), the background (the backdrop), and the style (aesthetic).
I typed “Seashells on an ocean background, aerial photo” for the example, below. In about a minute, the tool generated the full 26 letters.
Screenshot by Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET
If you don’t like some of the results, click on a letter and tap the regenerate button.
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Once you are happy with the design of the letters, you can start typing in the text box. As you do, the graphics will immediately populate — arguably the most satisfying part of the fun. Once you create something you like, you can save it as a PNG. You can see my results below.
GenType Alphabet Creator
The quality of the images is impressive. You can expand the PNG image above to see the details. Once you generate your first alphabet, you can create as many as you’d like — as with any other image generator. Quick warning: the tool is so satisfying that you may be glued to it for hours. Happy tinkering.