Tools: Powerful How To Turn 'sfo-jfk' Into A Suitable Photo

How do you turn a freeform query like ‘sfo-jfk’ into a beautiful image?

This was a real problem I to solve recently. Whenever our users create a trip, we find a beautiful photo of their destination and present it to them. To do this, we need a system that could understand anything, and respond with a hand-curated photo.

To solve this, I used LLMs for understanding, traditional software engineering in the middle, and human curation (by me) of photos by excellent (human) photographers. By walking through this, I hope to provide some inspiration for how to use LLMs in ways that feel crafted and not like slop!

I work on Stardrift, an AI travel planning app, and we let people type whatever they want into a chatbox. But then we need to turn that into a beautiful homepage of images for them:

Here are some silly ideas for how you could solve this. You could AI-generate an image for each conversation. But AI-generated images suck, and it’s expensive. You could Google search the destination – but that has copyright issues, and some risks:

Ultimately, what I wanted to do was hand-curate a beautiful mapping from ‘location’ to ‘destinations’. And I wanted to match a query that could be about literally anything to this.

If you break this problem down, there are effectively three problems here:

To explain how I built this, I’ll run through each step-by-step.

This was the simplest part of the project, from a technical perspective – and also the trickiest to design.

Nowadays, you can easily run a query like ‘SFO-JFK tomorrow’ through an LLM like Haiku and ask it to tell you where they’re going. Which is really cool – 5 years ago, this would have been impossible!

Source: HackerNews