Tailor-made AI image generation services for crafters

To address the need for clear positioning vis-à-vis existing services, Creative Fabrica (CF) created an umbrella brand called CF Spark (referring to the ability of AI to spark one’s imagination), grouping a range of AI productivity tools aiming to ‘unleash their users’ creativity’. In order to succeed, the services needed to be both distinctive and tailored to the specific needs and abilities of the CF audience. Rather than creating a complex interface with many whistles and bells, CF chose to offer a series of clearly identifiable, easy-to-use image generation services leveraging the specific affordances of AI such as parallel image generation and addressing specific needs such as pattern generation, transparent clean-cut clipart and design variations.

For the technical development of these custom services, CF turned to ML6, which had extensive experience in developing and in fine-tuning large models and in generative AI through its gener8.ai brand. ML6 helped CF amongst other services by creating a custom clean cut file clipart generation model, an efficient, high-speed outpainting service and an upscaler.

To deal with the relative novelty of AI image generation software, together with ML6, CF decided to use the open source Diffusers library by Hugging Face, which in the meantime has become the de facto standard for these types of setups. Moreover, by creating a custom API encapsulated in a docker container, it was possible to strike the right balance between customization and robustness.

Finally, to address the technological challenges associated with serving large neural networks to high numbers of concurrent users the CF infrastructure team worked with ML6 to come up with a setup on AWS which processes in the fastest and most efficient way possible. Amazon EC2 gives access to high-power GPUs in a very efficient way. Amazon ECS automatically scaled the solution to meet spikes in user activity. Being able to use a combination of spot and on-demand instances allowed to be cost very effective. Lastly, Amazon Simple Queue Service enabled the solution to easily decouple the AI microservices from the rest of the technology stack. With the elasticity and scalability of Amazon ECS and Amazon SQS, Creative Fabrica could focus on the value and the speed of innovation, without having to worry about the overhead caused by having to manage a complex infrastructure.