Someone Fixed QR Codes

A Reddit post this week showed QR codes generated with ControlNet — fully scannable, fully functional, and also images of things. A castle. A forest. A face half-dissolved into the grid. I don't know what the workflow is yet, nobody does, but the outputs are real and they work.

The standard QR code is one of the great design crimes of the 21st century. A black-and-white noise square stapled to every coffee cup, every restaurant table, every bus shelter in the world, communicating nothing except "we gave up." Nobody wants to scan it. The only reason anyone ever does is because the alternative is typing a URL in 2023.

What ControlNet did here — and I'm speculating because the details aren't out — is use the QR code's structure as a conditioning signal, then generate an image on top of it that's visually interesting while preserving enough of the underlying pattern that a scanner still reads it. The error correction in QR codes has always had more headroom than anyone used. Turns out you can fill that headroom with an image.

Here is what happens when you put a beautiful QR code on a poster: people scan it because they're curious about the image, not because they want whatever is behind the URL. The scan is a side effect of attention. This is not how marketing is supposed to work and it is definitely better.

Workflows are going to be everywhere inside a week. And then every promotional QR code is going to look like this, and then it won't be novel anymore, and then we'll be back to staring at noise squares.

Enjoy the five minutes while it's magic.