Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Recraft V3. Recraft are a generative AI design tool startup based out of London who released their v3 model a few weeks ago. It's currently sat at the top of the Artificial Analysis Image Arena Leaderboard, beating Midjourney and Flux 1.1 pro.

The thing that impressed me is that it can generate both raster and vector graphics... and the vector graphics can be exported as SVG!

Here's what I got for raccoon with a sign that says "I love trash" - SVG here.

Cute vector cartoon raccoon holding a sign that says I love trash - in the recraft.ai UI which is set to vector and has export options for PNG, JPEG, SVG and Lottie

That's an editable SVG - when I open it up in Pixelmator I can select and modify the individual paths and shapes:

Pixelmator UI showing the SVG with a sidebar showing each of the individual shapes - I have selected three hearts and they now show resize handles and the paths are highlighted in the sidebar

They also have an API. I spent $1 on 1000 credits and then spent 80 credits (8 cents) making this SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle, using my API key stored in 1Password:

export RECRAFT_API_TOKEN="$(
  op item get recraft.ai --fields label=password \
  --format json | jq .value -r)"

curl https://external.api.recraft.ai/v1/images/generations \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $RECRAFT_API_TOKEN" \
  -d '{
    "prompt": "california brown pelican riding a bicycle",
    "style": "vector_illustration",
    "model": "recraftv3"
  }'

A really rather good SVG of a California Brown Pelican riding a bicycle