Suffolk Reporter

Researchers at Stony Brook University have introduced a new AI-powered tool named Influencer, designed to assist individuals in creating promotional posts. This platform aims to address the challenges faced by college students and others seeking additional income who often struggle with technology, content, and design aspects when starting out.

Existing tools like Canva and ChatGPT offer solutions for design and content generation separately. However, Influencer combines both elements into one package, addressing a gap in the market. The platform allows users to specify prompts or context images, which helps maintain consistency and effectively communicate 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 difficulties that everyday users face when trying to create visually appealing posts with compelling captions. To address this issue, Ma collaborated with Jian Zhao from the University of Waterloo to develop Influencer.

Their research on Influencer was recently accepted at CHI 2025, a leading conference in human-computer interaction. In their study, Ma and Zhao compared Influencer's effectiveness against Google Search combined with Figma. They recruited twelve design enthusiasts who regularly engage in graphic design but are not professional designers. Participants were tasked with completing three assignments within a set time frame and then rated the platforms through a questionnaire.

The results showed that Influencer outperformed its competitors across various aspects 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."

For further details on this development, readers can access Ankita Nagpal's full story on the AI Innovation Institute website.