Amanda Smith is a freelance journalist and writer. She reports on culture, society, human interest and technology. Her stories hold a mirror to society, reflecting both its malaise and its beauty. Amanda's work has been published in National Geographic, The Guardian, Business Insider, Vice, News Corp, Singapore Airlines, Travel + Leisure, and Food & Wine. Amanda is an Australian living in the cultural center of gravity that is New York City.
Valentine's Day is here already, and you forgot to go out and buy a card. Or maybe, like me, you're just not into the corporatization of love. Even now that I'm happily married, Valentine's Day is just another day. A handwritten note and a bunch of chocolate (no flowers for me) is my jam. Thankfully, my wife also cringes at the thought of celebrating Hallmark's holiday.
But maybe we could all use the extra love and laughs, even if it's from a Valentine's Day card. Given that I don't have any sketching skills or time to hand make a card, though, I wanted to test out what artificial intelligence could create. (I'd also spent a small fortune on $8 cards at CVS, which I promised myself I wouldn't do again.)
A quick search for a tool to test, and I found Photoroom. While it was too big of an ask to "make her day" with an AI card, maybe it would make her laugh. Digital card sites can do the trick, but I was curious to see what AI had up its artificial sleeves.
Photoroom promises to help create personalized Valentine's Day cards in seconds. Released in 2020, it uses its own proprietary AI model trained on open license images and partner purchases. There is a free plan, as well as premium membership tiers at $90 a year. To access the AI Tools function, I signed up for the free one-week trial of Pro.
Photoroom has pregenerated prompts available, or you can use the chatbox to come up with your own prompts, like other AI tools I'm used to.
While the prompts are generic and to be expected -- like "You make my heart smile" and "you complete me" -- I picked one to generate a card, just to see the AI's "design" capabilities.
It didn't sweep me off my feet.
For round two, I used the Style prompt dropdown to test out different versions. They all looked very high school, with lots of butterflies and birds -- swiftly followed by cats, rabbits, penguins and dragons.
The problem seemed to be the categories. I realized mine was set to "NaΓ―ve Cuteness," whatever that is.
I picked a couple versions that had the least amount of AI-ness, then used the prompts and chatbox to tweak the design. I asked the AI to replace the love heart with an infinity sign (without changing the quote placement) but it either added the symbol but changed the text, or removed the heart altogether.
I finally settled on one, and asked the AI tool to regenerate it a couple of times:
I continued regenerating it with small tweaks. How does AI even make minimalism look bad? And it changed the font, even though I asked it not to.
After a few more rounds of regenerating, it got it right. I just needed the font bigger -- but this is as close as I could get:
Photoroom was really starting to irritate me, so I just picked one and asked it to change the text, but not the font. But at this point, the AI tool just started to ignore me. It literally generated the exact same image, and then started to add words in that made no sense.
I started over because I at least wanted to make my wife laugh. There was nothing personal about this "custom card" that I couldn't do in Canva or Photoshop.
This was the first prompt I gave: "Create an image of two women, one with curly brown hair and the other with blonde hair, holding their baby while walking the streets of New York City."
Not bad. I requested a text change, and it finally listened!
Below was the final result. Better than a Hallmark card, but not without its headaches, and it took a long time to get there.
While I didn't fall in love with Photoroom or the ability to use AI to create custom cards, it was more personal than a Hallmark (and it was free). It will make her feel special, but it doesn't come close to the poem she wrote me when we first started dating. She took one line from each of my favorite songs and turned it into a poem.
There's no topping that. When it comes to matters of the heart, we don't need AI.