Researchers at Stony Brook University launched Influencer — an easy-to-use AI-empowered interactive tool, made for design novices who need to create promotional posts every day, speedily.

Stony Brook, NY, Jan 27, 2025 - College students and individuals looking for extra income often face significant challenges when starting out, most of which are technology, content, and design-specific. They have to develop a website, start social media promotions, maintain mailing lists, and improve customer conversions, all with minimal resources.

Several companies have attempted to automate most of these processes, offering off-the-shelf tools that boast user-friendly design (Canva) and easy content generation (ChatGPT), but there are no emerging platforms that provide both design and caption creation in one package. In fact, most platforms mainly focus on the ideation step of design. They also don’t accommodate user-specified prompts or context images (e.g. brand image) to understand the design constraints, which are essential to maintain consistency and effectively communicate with a business’s target audience.

Tengfei Ma, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and member of the AI Innovation Institute at Stony Brook University, understood that creating eye-catching posts combining both appealing images and articulate captions can be challenging and time-consuming for everyday users.

To help tackle this challenge, Ma collaborated with Dr. Jian Zhao from the University of Waterloo. Their team built and launched Influencer — an AI-driven platform designed to streamline the promotional post design process. Their paper was recently accepted in CHI 2025, the top conference in the field of human-computer interaction.

Watch: Influencer enhances the effectiveness of promotional post design across branding scenarios by supporting engaging interactions, diverse explorations, and trackable thought processes.

Influencer begins with ideation. It offers relevant captions and images to inspire design ideas.

Then it moves to context-aware exploration — here, users can add design constraints to the task, like the requirement of a fixed color schema, a certain brand image, or a specific product message.

In the next step, called iterative customization, the user can ask for multiple designs to be fused, using LLMs and Generative AI.

At stage four, Influencer delivers multiple image-caption alternatives using a mindmap layout to help users organize ideas, and track thought processes.

A design novice uses Influencer to ideate and make promotional posts to promote her homemade juice.

For example, in the image above, the user starts by (A) inputting the topic in Influencer via a text block and explores the related images and captions in various directions. (B) Context-aware exploration is supported which updates the image and caption recommendations based on a brand/product image or message. (C) Various materials (i.e., image and text) can be flexibly fused to make a new image or caption. (D) Influencer allows the user to not only easily create harmonious promotional posts but also quickly obtain multiple post alternatives.

After it was launched, Ma and Zhao evaluated Influencer’s effectiveness against Google Search + Figma on multiple aspects of creativity and assistance in promotional post design.

They recruited twelve design enthusiasts who engage with graphic design on a daily basis, but are not proficient designers. Each of these participants was asked to perform three tasks within a set time limit, and then fill out a questionnaire rating these platforms.

According to their results, Influencer performed better in all aspects — from design experience to the usefulness of in-built functionality to the completion rate. In fact, 10 out of 12 participants stated that they would like to use Influencer as their promotional post design tool over Google Search + Figma. The same was true for the three experts the team interacted with, seeking their thoughts on the platform's ease of usage.

“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.”

Communications Assistant
Ankita Nagpal