[HN Gopher] Show HN: Shortbread App - AI-powered, romantic comic...
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Show HN: Shortbread App - AI-powered, romantic comics for women
Hi HN! Fengjiao and Evan here. We are building Shortbread App,
Netflix for webcomics. We publish guilty-pleasure romance series
(think 50 Shades of Gray) as comics. Like the mature version of
Webtoon. You can see two comics episodes at
https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/3d25370c-a4eb-4df4-af8e-...
https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/866c2873-9962-4ebe-8f0c-...,
and read more in the app via https://www.shortbreadapp.com/. All
comics in the app are made by artists using the Shortbread AI
Comics Studio (https://shortbread.ai). It is a powerful Photoshop-
like editor that speeds up comic creation 10x with AI. The editor
provides consistency and granular artistic control. More below. We
first posted on HN 6 months ago when we built a prompt-to-comics AI
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37792444). We sunsetted this
soon after - it was a fun experiment but it didn't meet the real
need of comic artists. Shortbread Studio now changes this by
enhancing how creators naturally work instead of replacing them.
The tech: One-shot Character LoRA: Artists upload a single photo
of their character. Our backend uses prompt engineering and
ControlNet pipelines to generate a synthetic dataset from this
photo. This dataset shows the character in all kinds of angles,
poses and facial expressions that the artist can pick the best
from. It's then sent to our LoRA training service to create a LoRA
model. This takes about 7 minutes. Control -> Redraw -> Refine
Workflow: In real life drawing, you draw, erase, and draw again.
The human creative process is iterative. In Shortbread Studio,
artists can start from a text prompt, a sketch, a web image or a
pose reference as a basis, create an initial panel and quickly
modify and regenerate until they get what they want. If you spend 5
seconds, you get a decent panel. If you spend 10 minutes, you can
push the limits and get pro results. Built-in Post-Processing: The
editor's features include liquify, upscale, remove background, and
outpainting to extend an image. This allows artists to remove, add,
or modify parts of an image on a pixel level without drawing by
hand. We combine this with segmentation models like Segment
Anything (https://github.com/facebookresearch/segment-anything) to
support intelligently selecting and editing a part of an image.
Google-docs like collaboration: The Studio runs in the browser and
supports comments and collaboration. LLM Powered Copy Editor:
Comics need text. An AI agent proofreads speech bubbles, fixes
lettering and identifies grammar mistakes. Read our comics:
https://shortbreadapp.com/ (free to download + read, iOS + Android)
All of the above are built by a team of 3 engineers including
myself. I will be around to answer any questions in this thread!
Author : Fengjiao
Score : 34 points
Date : 2024-06-04 15:22 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.shortbreadapp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.shortbreadapp.com)
| com2kid wrote:
| FYI your security certs are misconfigured and my ISP won't even
| let me visit your create.shortbread.ai subdomain.
|
| Might want to get that fixed!
| Fengjiao wrote:
| Thank youu - on it!
| jsheard wrote:
| > LLM Powered Copy Editor: Comics need text. An AI agent
| proofreads speech bubbles, fixes lettering and identifies grammar
| mistakes.
|
| There's an obvious lettering error in one of your own example
| links: https://i.imgur.com/BzB9XzS.png
| Fengjiao wrote:
| It's a preview link that adapts to your phone screen. Our
| artists use this link to render the content in realtime as they
| create. Published stuff goes through a microservice and is
| standardized.
| fwip wrote:
| Does "for women" here mean "for straight women?"
| filleduchaos wrote:
| Also, I have to wonder if anyone who actually _reads_ webcomics
| was involved in the production of this, because "professional
| quality" (read: hyperrealistic) art is not the selling point at
| all even for the decidedly NSFW ones.
| fao_ wrote:
| Indeed, the people I know who read them are often heavily
| invested in the art quality and the creator themselves.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| I'm more put-off by how it's headed-up by two dudes... making
| _fap-fiction_ ... "for women"; right away that's tone-deaf
| first impression (at best) - but if they're more than just
| naive then I think we might have material for a Coffeezilla
| video right here.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| Who would you expect to make that material?
| fao_ wrote:
| I mean, the first "slashfic" (smut fiction starring two
| popular characters) was Kirk/Spock slashfic written in the
| 1960s by a woman. The majority of writers on AO3 are women
| or enbies.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| Interesting. I probably would expect a cis female to
| enjoy the sender of such material to be a male, but I
| definitely stand to be enlightened on this.
| Fengjiao wrote:
| I'm a woman. Female. Female engineer. I have a vagina and I
| write code.
|
| All our creators, writers and artists are women.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| I can only apologise.
| Fengjiao wrote:
| Just getting started so the content is limited
| jdmoreira wrote:
| Great stuff you have going here.
|
| Any chance I could license your pipeline to create my own comics
| and publish outside your platform?
|
| Feel free to email me!
| theogravity wrote:
| Really confused by the HN tagline - the actual site doesn't
| mention anything that targets a specific reading audience.
|
| A sample of what a complete comic looks like would help. I'm not
| going to download the app to find out.
|
| Is this targeted more for those who write their own stories but
| cannot work with an artist to turn it into a visual story? Or,
| for artists who can't / don't have the time to draw but can
| provide the necessary inputs to generate assets they need for to
| build out a comic?
| Fengjiao wrote:
| There are two comic episodes in the post. You can open:
| https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/3d25370c-a4eb-4df4-af8e-...
| https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/866c2873-9962-4ebe-8f0c-...
|
| The ideal creator is someone who understands comics
| storytelling, but lacks the time or drawing skills. So either a
| writer or artist can do. In general, we see artists with prior
| drawing skills use it better because they understand good
| character acting, emotions and cinematography, etc.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| You're saying these comics are for women? Seems like these
| are for men...
| hehdhdjehehegwv wrote:
| I was confused by that as well...just looks like a bunch of
| hentai went into a blender.
| trealira wrote:
| It doesn't look at all like hentai, but the art does seem
| uncanny and stilted. It seems more like obvious wish-
| fulfillment romance, or at least the first one does; that
| one focuses on how some really rich guy that's relatively
| attractive is going out of his way to pamper and stand up
| for this woman.
| elicksaur wrote:
| >that speeds up comic creation 10x with AI.
|
| Any basis for this other than "10x" is a popular qualifier to use
| for AI marketing?
| Fengjiao wrote:
| bit buzz wordy yes. The actual speed up is now 1 artist does
| what used to be 1 main artist + 1 line artist + 1 colorist +
| postprocessing. So they can make a nice finished product alone.
| carstenhag wrote:
| * Clicking on the main "download in play store" button does
| nothing on my phone. On the hamburger menu it does work. * The
| website and screenshots look just like weird ads for weird
| "romantic games". Just in general doesn't look tidy/fine, it just
| looks sketchy. * The android all immediately asks for the push
| notification permission, before even anything is shown or I even
| know what this is useful for. Few users will allow this
| permission. * When starting the app again, it immediately opens
| the push message settings. _WHY_ would you do this? I want to
| open your app and without any dialog or context I land inside the
| settings.
| Fengjiao wrote:
| Sorry for the notification issues. Not intended like this -
| will fix now!
| poochkoishi728 wrote:
| Haha the new guy halfway through looks exactly like a white
| version of Rege-Jean Page (Simon Basset) from Bridgerton
| Fengjiao wrote:
| We struggled quite a bit trying to create an attractive non-
| white male lead, and ended up with this face that was stable.
| In most stable diffusion models trained on OSS datasets,
| keywords like "middle-age African man" "30 year old Asian man"
| will deform the face and head shape somewhat
| poochkoishi728 wrote:
| Kind of mirrors Hollywood, not as many black/asian male lead
| character data to draw from I guess
| monkpit wrote:
| > for women
|
| What a wild thing to say, you should reconsider that one
| haliskerbas wrote:
| Came here to say this, glad other people have it in mind as
| well.
| mushufasa wrote:
| I can see how women might consume more romantic fiction as
| comics/stories than men, though if there's nothing in your app
| that's only relevant for women, I'd recommend dropping that as
| part of your pitch
| mushufasa wrote:
| just like it'd be politically incorrect to say "I'm building
| a video game for men" even if 90% of first person shooter
| players are men
| Fengjiao wrote:
| G point - kinda did that for HN so people don't expect Marvel
| stuff, but might be overdone
| itishappy wrote:
| Wow, those examples are way better than I was expecting!
| Consistent characters, nice lettering, coherent (if uninspired)
| plots. Nice work!
|
| I think you'd be well served by improving your site a bit, which
| currently gives serious "low-effort AI" vibes.
|
| Examples are sorely needed, as out-of-context screenshots do not
| do justice to what you're creating. I'm not going to download an
| app just to figure out if I'm interested!
|
| Also, it sounds like the real value you're providing is in the
| Shortbread AI Comics Studio, so I'm confused why there doesn't
| seem to be any focus on that.
| Fengjiao wrote:
| Great point - thanks!! Yes, we should put better material out
| there.
|
| The real value would be to help these creators make money from
| making comics, which is not known as the most money grabbing
| career, so the shortbread app site is consumer focused and like
| you said, should attract them to read the content
| bazeblackwood wrote:
| Content slop from the grist mill, visual language stolen from
| thousands of legitimate artists
| hehdhdjehehegwv wrote:
| Yeah...I think Gen AI has a lot of use, but this new biz model
| is just a new twist on harvesting the commons until it
| collapses.
|
| They'll make a quick buck, make it impossible for human
| creators to make any money, and we'll be left with an ouroboros
| eating its own gen ai shit and reconstituting its own output
| into new training data.
| Fengjiao wrote:
| It's a tool for human creators. The stories are written by
| writers we found from platforms like Wattpad, Kindle and
| Chapters. Then the art is made by artists using the AI Studio
| where they control the characters' pose and facial expressions.
| That's the production process.
|
| So if this works, all creators get profit. It should enable
| more human creators to make money, since previously they
| couldn't complete a finished product alone.
| mushufasa wrote:
| I can totally see this being helpful for niche areas of fan
| fiction (cough, rule 34), where untalented fans demand content
| that is also not taking away any money from professional
| artists....
| hehdhdjehehegwv wrote:
| I wish people would quit with the "(existing product name) for
| (some remotely adjacent thing)" format.
|
| I get it helps to have a bridge from a known thing to the new
| thing, but the flip side is over use if any framing device makes
| people instinctively tune out.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Both of the examples given seem to be targeting male readers, not
| female readers. The first is about a man literally buying a
| woman's companionship. And the second is about a man
| "accidentally" entering a woman's hotel room and then pressuring
| her into performing various adult acts.
|
| The graphics are quite bad, and the dialogue is worse. If this is
| supposed to be an example of the "capabilities" of AI, it's the
| opposite: anyone who reads these will never complain about the
| poor quality of human-written romance lit ever again.
| Fengjiao wrote:
| It's webcomic romance stories. And the-billionaire-spends-all-
| his-money-on-me romance is a popular trope, out of others.
| There's long been a market for this for late night binge read.
| 50 shades of gray also came out of this market. It is a bit
| different from the Pulitzer and NYT bestsellers.
|
| You might also underestimate how many of your favorite writers
| ghostwrite stories like this for a side income.
| nilay wrote:
| The iOS app requires extensive user tracking data according to
| the App privacy section:
| https://i.postimg.cc/1zX7hkcV/IMG-5265.jpg
|
| Could you elaborate why data like browsing history, emails, text
| messages, and much more are needed to track users for the app?
| Fengjiao wrote:
| we actually removed most of the tracking because they're not
| necessary, should be updated in a new release
| mushufasa wrote:
| I downloaded the app but only saw a few stories to browse. No
| search or tags. I wasn't interested in any of the stories so I
| closed the app.
|
| Have you considered writing a few dozen comics yourselves to seed
| the experience? Authors won't want to publish if there are no
| readers, and readers won't want to brows if there's barely any
| content.
| Fengjiao wrote:
| Thank you for checking out the app - more will be there! We
| thought we'd launch early and learn what people like before
| committing to too many projects
| mushufasa wrote:
| good instinct. for content-based things, though, it's really
| hard to get good information about usage if there's not
| enough to round out a MVP, so I'd recommend fleshing this out
| if you want to track more than just initial downloads/clicks.
| in the early days of reddit, I think for the whole first
| year, the top posters were the founders, and they created
| spoof accounts to make it seem like it was more than two
| people posting. just so readers would have something to see.
| in your case this is more evergreen content so you probably
| don't have to go to quite these lengths, but point remains
| that a media platform is only as useful as the value of the
| media on it
| webwielder2 wrote:
| Is there a standard, user-friendly way of generating consistent
| AI images yet? Or is it just starting to emerge in patches like
| the tool here? Because DALL-E for example is a complete
| crapshoot; it has no ability for fine-tuning or persistence
| across images/iterations.
| ein0p wrote:
| Whoever manages to corner the "50 shades of grey" demographic is
| going to make a fortune.
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