WSU students have founded a company that uses AI generated imagining to create unique and different designs for shirts.
PicsGenie founder Jared Kelnhofer said other companies involved in AI such as ChatGPT and OpenAI fall short with image generation because of their lack of image scalability. Other AI images can’t exceed the width of an index card without becoming blurry because of the pixel lengths, which is where PicsGenie stepped in.
“I started working on this stuff back in December of 2022, we’ve been a group together for almost a year now, I added people to the team because I realized I could not do this all on my own,” Kelnhofer said.
There are currently six WSU students on the PicsGenie team, but they have mentors that give them help them and give them advice such as programmers, investors and CEOs, he said. There is a provisional patent filed for that process that can enlarge AI generated images and a provisional patent gives PicsGenie a year to file for a real patent, which gives the team time for market research.
“We take outputs of networks like ChatGPT and we add a step of scalability and then we’re putting it on a product in the real world,” he said.
Kelnhofer said he and his team conducted some of their market research by posting on the WSU community Snapchat story, asking for students’ opinions on AI and what they would like out of a product. PicsGenie at one point also made AI generated image products such as phone cases and posters but people were resoundingly interested in t-shirts.
They walked the runway in their PicsGenie shirts during the AMDT fashion show in early April, which was out of their comfort zone, but they did see a slight increase in sales, Kelnhofer said. He used ChatGPT to help come up with the name PicsGenie and he was able to buy a commercial domain for his website.
McKenna Cato, senior marketing and management information systems major, said her and Kelnhofer were in the Harold Frank Engineering Entrepreneurship Institute together, which combined business and engineering. She joined the PicsGenie team last August and she plays many roles in the group that involve the marketing aspects, such as competitive and consumer landscapes.
“I really love the people that I work with, we are all really driven and innovative and creative and for only being a student I am able to get a lot of say in what the team does,” Cato said.
