Show HN: Shortbread App – AI-powered, romantic comics for women (shortbreadapp.com)
You can see two comics episodes at https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/3d25370c-a4eb-4df4-af8e-... https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/866c2873-9962-4ebe-8f0c-..., and read more in the app via https://www.shortbreadapp.com/.
All comics in the app are made by artists using the Shortbread AI Comics Studio (https://shortbread.ai). It is a powerful Photoshop-like editor that speeds up comic creation 10x with AI. The editor provides consistency and granular artistic control. More below.
We first posted on HN 6 months ago when we built a prompt-to-comics AI (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37792444). We sunsetted this soon after - it was a fun experiment but it didn’t meet the real need of comic artists. Shortbread Studio now changes this by enhancing how creators naturally work instead of replacing them.
The tech:
One-shot Character LoRA: Artists upload a single photo of their character. Our backend uses prompt engineering and ControlNet pipelines to generate a synthetic dataset from this photo. This dataset shows the character in all kinds of angles, poses and facial expressions that the artist can pick the best from. It’s then sent to our LoRA training service to create a LoRA model. This takes about 7 minutes.
Control -> Redraw -> Refine Workflow: In real life drawing, you draw, erase, and draw again. The human creative process is iterative. In Shortbread Studio, artists can start from a text prompt, a sketch, a web image or a pose reference as a basis, create an initial panel and quickly modify and regenerate until they get what they want. If you spend 5 seconds, you get a decent panel. If you spend 10 minutes, you can push the limits and get pro results.
Built-in Post-Processing: The editor’s features include liquify, upscale, remove background, and outpainting to extend an image. This allows artists to remove, add, or modify parts of an image on a pixel level without drawing by hand. We combine this with segmentation models like Segment Anything (https://github.com/facebookresearch/segment-anything) to support intelligently selecting and editing a part of an image.
Google-docs like collaboration: The Studio runs in the browser and supports comments and collaboration.
LLM Powered Copy Editor: Comics need text. An AI agent proofreads speech bubbles, fixes lettering and identifies grammar mistakes.
Read our comics: https://shortbreadapp.com/ (free to download + read, iOS + Android)
All of the above are built by a team of 3 engineers including myself. I will be around to answer any questions in this thread!
101 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadMight want to get that fixed!
There's an obvious lettering error in one of your own example links: https://i.imgur.com/BzB9XzS.png
All our creators, writers and artists are women.
She is against womens rights being taken away. Trans people already have all the same rights as anyone else. Please name one right a trans person does not have that anyone else does
If predominantly one class of person wants to do something, you can easily discriminate against them by outlawing that specific action.
In contrast, articulating the "women's rights" that are being hurt by trans rights usually end up in an awkward formulation like "the right to have a place in which they won't see somebody they think is a man."
Losing access to single sex spaces (bathrooms, prisons, sports leagues, etc). Men are statistically more violent than women and you are suggesting we should just let them freely into womens spaces. This is why they have fought for their own spaces
Because, you see, after excluding all studies not carried out in the UK, restricting to studies on trans kids, and then individually discarding the studies that remain, there's no evidence of safety. In fact, there's no evidence at all! Further research is needed before we feed experimental drugs to our vulnerable children. (We have to pass an emergency prohibition about this, because those meddling "doctors" won't listen. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2024/727/made)
Cis kids are… biologically different, somehow? So the studies demonstrating safety and efficacy apply just fine to them. Yeah, that's totally the reason: medical necessity. Not politically-motivated discrimination against a protected minority, no siree.
https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-r...
Regardless, and it's anecdata -- but everyone I know who is working in the fields of medicine on the subjects the cass review covers, have pointed out numerous critical flaws in it that undermine every single point it makes. It's actually somewhat worse than if you got a PDF paper from Natural News dot com, a site that I discovered in the mid 2010s was rehosting and editing medical papers to say whatever they wanted.
there's a cautionary tale in there that applies to a few other hot topic issues, but it will be ignored, of course.
More to the point, when a male says he identifies as a woman, what exactly is he identifying with? You can't identify with a organs you don't have, so what could he actually be identifying with, if not sexist feminine stereotypes?
And how is it progressive to say that a man who identifies with feminine stereotypes is a woman? Is it not more progressive to say that a man who identifies with feminine stereotypes is simply a feminine man?
Any definition of woman that includes all cis women must include all trans women, or will otherwise include trans men.
Fertility? Many women are infertile.
Chromosomes? There is at least one genetic line of women in the world where they were all identified at birth as women and have each given birth, but have XY chromosomes. Anecdotally, many universities have had to stop genetics students from testing themselves for their chromosomes as a fun thing to do on the weekend, because the incident rate of chirality is MUCH higher than you would otherwise expect.
Any other such metrics either end up becoming pure phrenology or excluding massive amounts (millions) of women.
Moreover, trans women do not "identify with female stereotypes" and they are often most often strongly aligned with cis women who break stereotypes, cis women who are also largely targeted by the bathroom bills you are in favour of. The science says that being transgender isn't purely social and cannot be fixed through therapy, please avail yourself of the cult[0] that you are a part of.
Thank you for your time.
[0]: https://beaudyess.medium.com/
correctly so.
Any chance I could license your pipeline to create my own comics and publish outside your platform?
Feel free to email me!
A sample of what a complete comic looks like would help. I'm not going to download the app to find out.
Is this targeted more for those who write their own stories but cannot work with an artist to turn it into a visual story? Or, for artists who can't / don't have the time to draw but can provide the necessary inputs to generate assets they need for to build out a comic?
The ideal creator is someone who understands comics storytelling, but lacks the time or drawing skills. So either a writer or artist can do. In general, we see artists with prior drawing skills use it better because they understand good character acting, emotions and cinematography, etc.
A note for this genre: there are only a handful of basic plotlines in this genre. It is more about the execution of the plotline than the uniqueness of the plot itslef. This is true of manhua in general: it is very formulaic but 1 out of each dozen or so will execute it well while the others will fail miserably. The three largest easily quantifiable factors in this formula are the speed that the story plays out, the way in which one character makes the other one fall for them (generally, the way in which the rich man makes the girl fall for him) and the likeability of the characters.
Also the comics don’t render properly at all on my iPhone so it was hard to even scan them for their plot lines. The frames were all cut off. But a guy throwing a lot of money at a woman reads as weird and creepy to me - it shows me only that he wants something from her and is rich, but doesn’t indicate at all whether he is actually any good for her, or whether he cares about her as a complete human being or as an object to be acquired.
Edit: Also if the comics are written for women, I hope they are written by women. Otherwise a lot can get lost in translation.
I liked the bit about “my actual fiancé” … that was a good twist but the rest was fairly tropey.
Any basis for this other than “10x” is a popular qualifier to use for AI marketing?
What a wild thing to say, you should reconsider that one
I think you'd be well served by improving your site a bit, which currently gives serious "low-effort AI" vibes.
Examples are sorely needed, as out-of-context screenshots do not do justice to what you're creating. I'm not going to download an app just to figure out if I'm interested!
Also, it sounds like the real value you're providing is in the Shortbread AI Comics Studio, so I'm confused why there doesn't seem to be any focus on that.
The real value would be to help these creators make money from making comics, which is not known as the most money grabbing career, so the shortbread app site is consumer focused and like you said, should attract them to read the content
They’ll make a quick buck, make it impossible for human creators to make any money, and we’ll be left with an ouroboros eating its own gen ai shit and reconstituting its own output into new training data.
So if this works, all creators get profit. It should enable more human creators to make money, since previously they couldn’t complete a finished product alone.
also according to this same logic, any artist who uses a style that was informed by "thousands of (other) legitimate artists" whose art this person consumed prior, that person is "stealing"
I get it helps to have a bridge from a known thing to the new thing, but the flip side is over use if any framing device makes people instinctively tune out.
The graphics are quite bad, and the dialogue is worse. If this is supposed to be an example of the "capabilities" of AI, it's the opposite: anyone who reads these will never complain about the poor quality of human-written romance lit ever again.
You might also underestimate how many of your favorite writers ghostwrite stories like this for a side income.
Could you elaborate why data like browsing history, emails, text messages, and much more are needed to track users for the app?
Have you considered writing a few dozen comics yourselves to seed the experience? Authors won't want to publish if there are no readers, and readers won't want to brows if there's barely any content.