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Show HN: Shortbread App – AI-powered, romantic comics for women (shortbreadapp.com)
62 points by Fengjiao 5 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 94 comments
Hi HN! Fengjiao and Evan here. We are building Shortbread App, Netflix for webcomics. We publish guilty-pleasure romance series (think 50 Shades of Gray) as comics. Like the mature version of Webtoon.

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!




Wow, those examples are way better than I was expecting! Consistent characters, nice lettering, coherent (if uninspired) plots. Nice work!

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.


Great point - thanks!! Yes, we should put better material out there.

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


Really confused by the HN tagline - the actual site doesn't mention anything that targets a specific reading audience.

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?


There are two comic episodes in the post. You can open: https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/3d25370c-a4eb-4df4-af8e-... https://create.shortbread.ai/viewer/866c2873-9962-4ebe-8f0c-...

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.


Thats cool. Feels more like a storyboard for a show than a comic. It was a bit long winded and could probably be condensed to a 4 by 4 grid of panels (IMO).

I liked the bit about “my actual fiancé” … that was a good twist but the rest was fairly tropey.


A lot of comics have moved to a long single column of panels these days, I assume it's for easier mobile reading.


You’re saying these comics are for women? Seems like these are for men…


As an expert in this area, I can say that these comics highly resemble manhua for women. The story of the rich man 'buying' the plain but good looking girl is very popular in China. In fact in the title it says "Art: C.C. Chen" which is obviously a Chinese name. I have read a few dozen of these manhua. The general plotline is a rich and powerful man, the plain but good looking girl, and an assortment of competing mean girls who try to kill the feMC and abort her babies. I can tell this will be the general plotline just from the first few panels.

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.


Gotcha, thanks for the explanation, I’m not familiar with that genre or the gender roles in that culture. Also I’m gay and poly so most of the spicy comics I read are very, very different to this. In particular marriage is significantly less important in polyamorous and gay communities - the quality of the connection between the two individuals is the biggest turn on in romantic content.

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.


Thanks for the insightful comment. All the above is true! C.C is an artist we recruited from a Chinese manhua app. We're reproducing and repackaging some killer tropes in Asian markets for the west


I was confused by that as well…just looks like a bunch of hentai went into a blender.


It doesn't look at all like hentai, but the art does seem uncanny and stilted. It seems more like obvious wish-fulfillment romance, or at least the first one does; that one focuses on how some really rich guy that's relatively attractive is going out of his way to pamper and stand up for this woman.


To be fair I’m not a hentai expert.


Neither am I, but I've seen at least one hentai, and I think it tends to have a manga art style and be more sexually explicit.


The iOS app requires extensive user tracking data according to the App privacy section: https://i.postimg.cc/1zX7hkcV/IMG-5265.jpg

Could you elaborate why data like browsing history, emails, text messages, and much more are needed to track users for the app?


we actually removed most of the tracking because they're not necessary, should be updated in a new release


What tracking is necessary and thus you haven't removed?


contact info & identifiers, same as most apps (tiktok, instagram etc)


* Clicking on the main "download in play store" button does nothing on my phone. On the hamburger menu it does work. * The website and screenshots look just like weird ads for weird "romantic games". Just in general doesn't look tidy/fine, it just looks sketchy. * The android all immediately asks for the push notification permission, before even anything is shown or I even know what this is useful for. Few users will allow this permission. * When starting the app again, it immediately opens the push message settings. WHY would you do this? I want to open your app and without any dialog or context I land inside the settings.


Sorry for the notification issues. Not intended like this - will fix now!


Both of the examples given seem to be targeting male readers, not female readers. The first is about a man literally buying a woman's companionship. And the second is about a man "accidentally" entering a woman's hotel room and then pressuring her into performing various adult acts.

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.


It’s webcomic romance stories. And the-billionaire-spends-all-his-money-on-me romance is a popular trope, out of others. There’s long been a market for this for late night binge read. 50 shades of gray also came out of this market. It is a bit different from the Pulitzer and NYT bestsellers.

You might also underestimate how many of your favorite writers ghostwrite stories like this for a side income.


>that speeds up comic creation 10x with AI.

Any basis for this other than “10x” is a popular qualifier to use for AI marketing?


bit buzz wordy yes. The actual speed up is now 1 artist does what used to be 1 main artist + 1 line artist + 1 colorist + postprocessing. So they can make a nice finished product alone.


Does anyone on your team make comics themselves? Because these examples don't feel like sequential comics. There's a craft to making comics and it's entirely absent in these.


> for women

What a wild thing to say, you should reconsider that one


I think this is a language barrier thing. In Japanese for example "Josei Manga" (lit. "female comics") is a completely acceptable term. One of the largest comic publishers in Japan is called "Shounen Jump," with shounen meaning "boy." It is similar in Chinese manhua (which this app seems to be based of but for a western audience). Every manhua app will first ask you if you are interested in girls or boys comics. For example the home screen of BiliBili Manhua has "女生" (girl) and 男生 (boy) as separate tabs (out of only seven total tabs with the others being like new, trending etc.). It is really more of describing a specific genre than about who is 'allowed' to consume it.


More good background. I know that in California where I live, it’s becoming less popular to explicitly divide things by gender, so that might explain why some people have a negative reaction to it. I can understand that some other cultures have more strongly defined gender roles.


I can see how women might consume more romantic fiction as comics/stories than men, though if there's nothing in your app that's only relevant for women, I'd recommend dropping that as part of your pitch


just like it'd be politically incorrect to say "I'm building a video game for men" even if 90% of first person shooter players are men


G point - kinda did that for HN so people don't expect Marvel stuff, but might be overdone


I'm not sure how that would convey that. Is Marvel not for women?


labeling it as "for women" is wise, because that makes it acceptable. the media is fuming, stomping their feet and foaming at the mouth about generative AI being used by men for what little sexual gratification can be obtained from low quality slop LLMs and image generator produce.


True. There are men who watch the Lifetime and Hallmark channels, for example.


Came here to say this, glad other people have it in mind as well.


> LLM Powered Copy Editor: Comics need text. An AI agent proofreads speech bubbles, fixes lettering and identifies grammar mistakes.

There's an obvious lettering error in one of your own example links: https://i.imgur.com/BzB9XzS.png


It's a preview link that adapts to your phone screen. Our artists use this link to render the content in realtime as they create. Published stuff goes through a microservice and is standardized.


Seems like good technical execution but why not put a video on the homepage? BTW you are serving lots of PNGs on your site. You might want to make the site load faster with jpeg or webp, that would reduce bandwidth costs too. There is transparent HTTP middleware for that sort of thing.


Thank youuu we’ll definitely do!


Is there a standard, user-friendly way of generating consistent AI images yet? Or is it just starting to emerge in patches like the tool here? Because DALL-E for example is a complete crapshoot; it has no ability for fine-tuning or persistence across images/iterations.


They used LoRa. Alternatively you can use IP-Adapter and ControlNet, there are models for face, style, composition, lighting, etc... Search for "ComfyUI IP-Adapter workflow".


We use LoRA models with stable diffusion models. They can be trained quickly with minimal 30-50 images of your subject. (https://civitai.com/articles/2099/lora-models-and-how-to-use...)


This startup breaks every rule of startup promoted by YC and still may succeed, which shows that there’s no absolute truths in company building.


Btw this app category is very well established so I get why a bunch of dudes are creating an app for romantic stories. Not sure if AI matters enough for this product to win at all tho


I'm a woman and ex-creator on an app like this. AI matters as a productivity tool as all content platforms struggle with getting more content, but yes there's a bunch of other important things


How so


FYI your security certs are misconfigured and my ISP won't even let me visit your create.shortbread.ai subdomain.

Might want to get that fixed!


Thank youu - on it!


Content slop from the grist mill, visual language stolen from thousands of legitimate artists


It’s a tool for human creators. The stories are written by writers we found from platforms like Wattpad, Kindle and Chapters. Then the art is made by artists using the AI Studio where they control the characters’ pose and facial expressions. That’s the production process.

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.


according to this same logic, unless humans remain artists, there will be no new styles to copy ;)

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"


Yeah…I think Gen AI has a lot of use, but this new biz model is just a new twist on harvesting the commons until it collapses.

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.


I can totally see this being helpful for niche areas of fan fiction (cough, rule 34), where untalented fans demand content that is also not taking away any money from professional artists....


The studio actually looks pretty impressive. I think you’re constraining your marketing too much. Seems useful not just as “romantic comics for women” but a general art tool.


Do you know what state of the art for storytelling generation is? Searching for my thesis and not sure whether papers reflect the current state of the art.


I downloaded the app but only saw a few stories to browse. No search or tags. I wasn't interested in any of the stories so I closed 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.


Thank you for checking out the app - more will be there! We thought we'd launch early and learn what people like before committing to too many projects


good instinct. for content-based things, though, it's really hard to get good information about usage if there's not enough to round out a MVP, so I'd recommend fleshing this out if you want to track more than just initial downloads/clicks. in the early days of reddit, I think for the whole first year, the top posters were the founders, and they created spoof accounts to make it seem like it was more than two people posting. just so readers would have something to see. in your case this is more evergreen content so you probably don't have to go to quite these lengths, but point remains that a media platform is only as useful as the value of the media on it


Haha the new guy halfway through looks exactly like a white version of Regé-Jean Page (Simon Basset) from Bridgerton


We struggled quite a bit trying to create an attractive non-white male lead, and ended up with this face that was stable. In most stable diffusion models trained on OSS datasets, keywords like "middle-age African man" "30 year old Asian man" will deform the face and head shape somewhat


I wish people would quit with the “(existing product name) for (some remotely adjacent thing)” format.

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.


Does "for women" here mean "for straight women?"


Also, I have to wonder if anyone who actually reads webcomics was involved in the production of this, because "professional quality" (read: hyperrealistic) art is not the selling point at all even for the decidedly NSFW ones.


Indeed, the people I know who read them are often heavily invested in the art quality and the creator themselves.


Just getting started so the content is limited


I’m more put-off by how it’s headed-up by two dudes… making fap-fiction… “for women”; right away that’s tone-deaf first impression (at best) - but if they’re more than just naive then I think we might have material for a Coffeezilla video right here.


I'm a woman. Female. Female engineer. I have a vagina and I write code.

All our creators, writers and artists are women.


I can only apologise.


[flagged]


Regardless of its supposed descriptive accuracy, the term is meant as a political pejorative.


Standing up for womens rights gets you labeled a TERF now. It's not exactly a bad thing to be called these days lol. Heck, even JK Rowling gets called this and shes the furthest from transphobic.


This is rather off topic but jk rowling is basically the definition of a woman who thinks increased rights for trans people hurts women.


She's not wrong though is she. I mean just look at the awful consequences of SB132.


uhh, no. https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1269407862234775552?lang=en

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


This exact same argument was used against gay marriage ("gay people can get straight married!" and interracial marriage ("anybody can marry somebody of the same race!").

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."


So again, what right do trans people not have? They can get married. It's very easy to articulate the womens rights that are being violated lately. Simply talk to any women in the real world

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


In the UK: access to GnRHa hormone blockers during childhood. Routinely prescribed for precocious puberty in cis kids, yet literally illegal to prescribe to trans kids.

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.


I'm not sure what you are arguing, but yes, unless a clear medical emergency the science definitely says kids should not be taking puberty blockers. Nearly every country is cracking down on giving them to kids (trans or not)

https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-r...


You just cited the report that the poster above you referenced as cherry-picked, which is rather amusing!

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.


in some states, using the bathroom that most closely aligns with their gender


? That's not a right. There is a reason women fought decades for their own sex spaces


Women were initially against segregated bathrooms though


the very definition of "a woman" is an ongoing controversy right now.

there's a cautionary tale in there that applies to a few other hot topic issues, but it will be ignored, of course.


Something to consider: when you remove the female body from the definition of woman, what else remains besides sexist feminine stereotypes?

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?


> Something to consider: when you remove the female body from the definition of woman, what else remains besides sexist feminine stereotypes?

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/


>or will otherwise include trans men.

correctly so.


So what are these males identifying with then?


Who would you expect to make that material?


I mean, the first "slashfic" (smut fiction starring two popular characters) was Kirk/Spock slashfic written in the 1960s by a woman. The majority of writers on AO3 are women or enbies.


Interesting. I probably would expect a cis female to enjoy the sender of such material to be a male, but I definitely stand to be enlightened on this.


Great stuff you have going here.

Any chance I could license your pipeline to create my own comics and publish outside your platform?

Feel free to email me!


You can use it for free and I can give you unlimited usage, although not licensing for now! Didn't see your email. Send me an email at myhnusername@shortbread.ai


Whoever manages to corner the “50 shades of grey” demographic is going to make a fortune.


are the comics written by ai? the app store says they're "crafted by some of the web's bestselling authors"


This is honestly a really cool and unique concept that appears well-executed!

继续加油！




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