Researchers from Stony Brook University have introduced an AI-powered platform called Influencer, aimed at simplifying the creation of promotional posts for individuals with limited design experience. This new tool is designed to assist college students and others seeking additional income by addressing common challenges related to technology, content, and design.
The current market offers tools like Canva for user-friendly design and ChatGPT for content generation. However, these platforms often focus on ideation without integrating both design and caption creation in a single package. They also lack features that allow users to specify prompts or context images, which are crucial for maintaining consistency in communication with target audiences.
Tengfei Ma, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Stony Brook University and a member of the AI Innovation Institute, recognized the difficulty faced by users in creating visually appealing posts with effective captions. To address this issue, Ma collaborated with Jian Zhao from the University of Waterloo to develop Influencer. Their research was recently presented at CHI 2025, a leading conference on human-computer interaction.
In their study, Ma and Zhao compared Influencer's performance against Google Search combined with Figma across various aspects of creativity and assistance in designing promotional posts. They enlisted twelve graphic design enthusiasts who are not professional designers to complete three tasks within a specified time frame using both platforms. The participants then completed a questionnaire evaluating each platform.
The results showed that Influencer outperformed its competitors in all evaluated areas including design experience, functionality usefulness, and task completion rate. "This is a clear demonstration of how Influencer significantly improves the ideation and design process," said Ma. "It has the potential to help users generate more creative and higher-quality promotional posts than most existing design platforms available today."
Further details can be found in Ankita Nagpal's full story on the AI Innovation Institute website.