AI and Symbols for Festivals

During December there are several festivals that take place around the world and next week in the UK we have Christmas and many towns and homes have fir trees decorated with decorations. In India the Jellow pictographic symbols have two versions for their festival and holiday category. One is localised (1) and the other international (2) and both show a Christmas tree.

On our journey during the year using stable diffusion to generate symbols in the style of other open licenced pictographic symbols we have learnt about the types of images that can be created in a similar style and this is before we have added a text prompt to adapt the symbol. Obviously if the are many examples of a symbol type in the training data it will be more successful and better represent the original symbol, but other aspects are important such as an object with clear outlines and strong contrasting colours. However, even where all symbol backgrounds are transparent these seem to change to different colours, as do any additional symbols alongside a main symbol. A combination of symbols may be vital to provide context.

In the AI generated examples below (Jellow symbol replications), where the odd numbers are the local festivals and the even numbers are the international versions, it is clear to see that the tree becomes the consistent feature that can be replicated time and again and less defined objects are missed or incorrectly replicated.

We have also learnt how hard it is to successfully replicate image styles of abstract ideas or symbols representing words such as 'almost' which may be a series of lines, where there is so little training data and each adverb may have the same colour lines or shapes but in different positions or shapes.

Also as we wave good-bye to 2023 we know there are issues accurately generating hands - we hope we can eventually improve on the results below to allow us to adapt gestures that come with symbols of people, as they are important for communication

Happy Christmas and New Year and thank you to Jellow symbols