After greater than a yr in development, Lore Machine is now available to the general public for the primary time. For $10 a month, you’ll be able to upload 100,000 words of text (as much as 30,000 words at a time) and generate 80 images for brief stories, scripts, podcast transcripts, and more. There are price points for power users too, including an enterprise plan costing $160 a month that covers 2.24 million words and 1,792 images. The illustrations are available a variety of preset styles, from manga to watercolor to pulp ’80s TV show.

Zac Ryder, founding father of creative agency Modern Arts, has been using an early-access version of the tool since Lore Machine founder Thobey Campion first showed him what it could do. Ryder sent over a script for a brief film, and Campion used Lore Machine to show it right into a 16-page graphic novel overnight.

“I remember Thobey sharing his screen. All of us were just completely floored,” says Ryder. “It wasn’t a lot the image generation aspect of it. It was the extent of the storytelling. From the flow of the narrative to the emotion of the characters, it was spot on right out of the gate.”

Modern Arts is now using Lore Machine to develop a fictional universe for a manga series based on text written by the creator of Netflix’s .

LORE MACHINE / WILL DOUGLAS HEAVEN

Under the hood, Lore Machine is built from familiar parts. A big language model scans your text, identifying descriptions of individuals and places in addition to its overall sentiment. A version of Stable Diffusion generates the photographs. What sets it apart is how easy it’s to make use of. Between uploading my story and downloading its storyboard, I clicked possibly half a dozen times.

That makes it certainly one of a recent wave of user-friendly tools that hide the stunning power of generative models behind a one-click web interface. “It’s lots of work to remain current with recent AI tools, and the interface and workflow for every tool is different,” says Ben Palmer, CEO of the Recent Computer Corporation, a content creation firm. “Using a mega-tool with one consistent UI may be very compelling. I feel like that is where the industry will land.”

Look! No prompts

Campion arrange the corporate behind Lore Machine two years ago to work on a blockchain version of Wikipedia. But when he saw how people took to generative models, he switched direction. Campion used the free-to-use text-to-image model Midjourney to make a comic-book version of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s . It went viral, he says, however it was no fun to make.

LORE MACHINE / WILL DOUGLAS HEAVEN

“My wife hated that project,” says Campion. “I used to be as much as 4 within the morning, every night, just hammering away, attempting to get these images right.” The issue was that text-to-image models like Midjourney generate images one after the other. That makes it hard to take care of consistency between different images of the identical characters. Even locking in a particular style across multiple images might be hard. “I ended up veering toward a trippier, abstract expression,” he says.