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Letter Spirit is artificially intelligent font design software that’s been around for more than 30 years. Unlike other AI-generated…

Letter Spirit is artificially intelligent font design software that’s been around for more than 30 years. Unlike other AI-generated software in the news lately, it actually tries to model the human creative process. What can we learn from it?

The project is older than Zendaya, although it is enjoying a somewhat less successful career. Despite the the breathless warnings about DALL-e and ChatGPT, even after 30 years of hard work, Letter Spirit has not yet displaced a single human designer.

I discovered the project in a book called “Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies” by Douglas Hofstadter. If you’re a product person interested in AI/ML you should buy everything Hofstadter has written.

I got interested in this work about twenty years ago. I got re-interested about a decade later when I got involved in the font business. Letter Spirit goes back much further to the publication of a PhD thesis by Gary McGraw 1993. Hofstadter was, I believe, McGraw’s thesis advisor at Indiana University. McGraw’s thesis notes say the research in his computational models goes back to 1980.

The paper claims that the project “model[s] central aspects of human high-level perception and creativity on a computer.” That’s pretty wicked for 1993, squarely in the 14.4kbps era.

It’s always bothered me a little that the Generative Adversarial Networks (DALL-E etc) seem a little bit crude, although the results can be compelling. Somebody explained to me that GANs “spray” pixels essentially randomly. They then compare the output with their previous attempt, killing off whichever result compares worse to the expected outcome. It then repeats this process against the survivor.

Sorry to sound maudlin, but must we do things this way? Talking about GANs sometimes makes me feel a little uncomfortable. It reminds me of when André the Giant in The Princess Bride realizes he’s made of softer stuff. “My way is not so sporting!”

Letter Spirit is way more sporting! Many of Hofstadter’s projects have this playful, curious quality. The computer makes discoveries in an elegant, surprising way.

If Artificial Intelligence is becoming the dominant form, may I suggest we might consider approaches that seem made of similarly softer stuff?

Here’s one such alternative: Letter Spirit considers which aspects of a letter are essential to maintain, and which to explore or creatively experiment on.

As it designs a font, it considers which parts of the “A” it can change and which must remain for it to still be recognized as “A”. When it moves on to “B”, it will change “B” in a way that are spiritually similar to the changes it made to the “A”. That’s Letter Spirit!

How are you feeling right now? Not bad, right? Read more about it in the comments.

If I had bet in 1993 that Letter Spirit wouldn’t ruin a dollar of designer income for 30 years, I would have won. Maybe that’s not a sure bet for the next 30 years, but it’s interesting to consider the history that led us to today’s intelligent machines.

(Thank you Gary McGraw for Letter Spirit. I am so sorry about anything I got wrong about your awesome project or career. Thanks for all of your amazing work! You are my hero.)