Using AI as a Multiplier: Creating a Year of the Dragon Greeting Card Mini-Program
The emergence of AIGC at the end of 2022 made 2023 the first year of Artificial General Intelligence.
This is the best of times. With AI, things that previously existed only in imagination can become reality.
With just a few words, you can create a colorful painting - a realistic and rich painting.
Currently, there aren't many large models for AI image generation. The famous Midjourney is closed-source and inconvenient for domestic users.
Stable Diffusion, a free, open-source, and powerful AI image generation model, is becoming the darling of AI art.
For example, this New Year celebration image was created by Stable Diffusion:
Stable Diffusion supports text-to-image (generating images from text prompts), image-to-image (generating images from base images + text prompts), text-to-video, and video-to-video.
Here's an example of image-to-image, generating a realistic apple image (right) from a hand-drawn base image (left):
And here's the AI transformation video that was popular on TikTok recently:
To explore the boundaries of Stable Diffusion's imagination, as the Year of the Dragon approached, we decided to develop a Dragon Year greeting card mini-program. Here's the effect:
We chose an open-source framework called Comfy UI, which uses workflow-based interactions to make Stable Diffusion arrangement and image generation more convenient and efficient:
Comfy UI officially describes itself as: "The most powerful graphical interface for Stable Diffusion"
👉 Official link: https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI
Despite having Comfy UI's support, we hit a wall from the start - unable to generate text, as shown:
The left image "Happy Dragon Year" (龙年大吉) is the base image we input to Stable Diffusion, and the right is the generated image based on the base image and prompts.
As you can see, the text is completely chaotic.
Even the mighty Midjourney can't solve this pain point, due to the special nature of text.
Take Chinese characters for example - there are seal script, clerical script, regular script, running script, cursive script, etc., with arrangements from left to right, right to left, top to bottom, etc.
Another solution approach is to use text as one of the base images, like this "Happy Dragon Year" image:
Generation result:
This approach seemed workable, but we quickly ran into trouble. For slightly complex characters, the generation effect was poor, like "甲辰臻祥" (Auspicious Year of Jiachen):
To solve this problem, given time constraints, we had to make changes at the product level. The greeting card image consists of template + main image, with templates pre-made and main images generated by AI without text:
Another issue is with complex content involving people, like hands and faces. The generation effect is poor, as shown in this little girl's hands:
There are several solutions:
- Choose an appropriate Stable Diffusion model
- Use plugins for hand and face correction
- Add negative prompts
With the above exploration, we finally began our multiplication journey.
First, we selected New Year elements like dragons, the God of Wealth, lanterns, cranes, etc.
Second, styles - we explored over ten styles generated by Stable Diffusion:
Stable Diffusion is rock solid, mastering all styles.
Through , we generated corresponding style images for each element.
The power of multiplication is self-evident. In just a few weeks, we generated over ten thousand images for the greeting card mini-program.
Before AIGC, this was absolutely impossible. All we could do was addition, and we'd need professional designers.
Assuming a designer creates one image in 5 minutes, ten thousand images would take at least 34 days working non-stop:
This kind of labor and time cost was instantly reduced by AI.
AI is still in its early stages. I believe as time goes on, AI capabilities will become stronger and application scenarios will expand. Let's wait and see.
The mini-program has officially launched with a festive name: "Hua Nian" (Draw Year)
Simple operation - choose a template you like and generate with one click:
If you're not satisfied, you can adjust the image or blessing message:
If you need New Year greeting cards, feel free to try this mini-program. It's currently free to use.