Tech

It revolutionizes QR codes thanks to generative AI, labels will never be the same again

A programmer calling himself nhciao presented the fruit of his work on generative AIs and QR codes. This results in beautiful, square, scannable artwork. The general public and the advertising world will certainly love it.

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Credit: nhcia0

Members of Reddit therefore had the scoop on what promises to be a real artistic revolution and marketing. Not only are the eight QR codes he posted AI-generated, but on top of that, they look beautiful…and functional. The age of stark black and white barcodes is coming to an end.

ControlNet-for-qr-code
Credit: nhcia0

The engineer posted images of QR codes in the style of anime and other Asian prints. Scanning this QR code with your Android or iOS smartphone will redirect you to the developer’s site. Achieving this result required a long preparatory work. nhcia leveraged the machine learning model of Stable Diffusion and other technologies to generate images from textual descriptions and adapt them to the format specific to QR codes.

Stable Diffusion’s generative AI helps create beautiful and useful QR codes

QR codes are currently used in commerce, marketing and industry. They can contain various types of data, be it images, a hyperlink or simply text. A property often exploited by hackers, unfortunately. Their austere appearance is an advantage as much as a disadvantage: they are not very beautiful, but at least they remain discreet. By the magic of AI, it is now possible to place a QR code in a real table, and that changes everything.

controlNet-stable-broadcast-qr-code
Credit: nhcia0

How did nhcia go about accomplishing this little miracle? Without going into the technical detail that you will find on his blog (in Chinese), our man took advantage of Stable Diffusion’s image generation capabilities and the error-correcting capabilities of QR codes (quick response code), which allow them to restore missing information if any part of the blocks is missing or damaged. This specificity allowed the programmer to create intricately patterned QR codes which almost make you forget that it is a label to be scanned.

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