New Tools

Sometimes new tools work differently than expected.

My name is Scott S. I have worked with My Father's World since 2003. My primary role is IT (Information Technology) and I also do some of the typesetting of our materials. I have helped in most areas of the company over the years, filling in as needs have arisen.

Recently, while working on a typesetting project, I needed to update three pages with text that had been merged into a drawing. On two of the pages, the text was on top of a sky background. The software being used has a new AI (artificial intelligence) feature and I decided to give that a try to remove the text. I selected the area to update and entered the query, "remove the text and replace with a sky background similar to the rest of the image." On the first page it worked great. The replaced area matched the rest of the background, and it even put in a cloud that matched the style of the rest of the image.

On the second page with text on a sky background I repeated the same process. I selected the area to replace and typed in, "remove the text and replace with a sky background similar to the rest of the image." The result was the interesting creature in the image above. Is it a cat? Is it a dog? Is it an odd colored koala bear? We couldn't decide what creature it was, but we definitely knew it didn't fit with the sky background.

I made some additional attempts to have AI remove the text from the background and none of them worked. Only the first attempt generated a critter. The subsequent results were not cute or funny, and they were not what was needed. On this page, AI just could not figure out how to make the background match the rest of the picture. Eventually, I had to just draw a new background to remove the text and move on with completing the updates to the page manually.

The lesson I learned is that new tools, like AI, while they may be fun to try, may give results that aren't quite what you are expecting.