ZJU-REAL/Easel

📚 What is Easel?

Easel is an open‑source, AI‑powered “content workbench” for people who run social‑media accounts. It stitches together an OpenClaw agent, a profile ("account portrait") that remembers a channel’s style, audience and history, and a library of “skills” (scripts that actually create images, audio, video, text, etc.). The result is a single assistant that can:

1. Discover hot topics across platforms (Weibo, Douyin, Zhihu, B‑Station, Baidu, Toutiao …).
2. Plan a content calendar – pick topics, write titles, outline scripts, score ideas.
3. Create copy, graphics, infographics, memes, AI‑generated images, voice‑overs, music, video edits, subtitles, etc.
4. Publish the finished assets directly to seven Chinese platforms (Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Kuaishou, Zhihu, B‑Station, WeChat Video, WeChat Official Account) with automatic format‑adaptation and a pre‑publish checklist.
5. Attribute performance data (views, comments, ROI) back into the profile so the next round of creation is better informed.

Think of it as a “personal, continuously‑evolving social‑media assistant” that remembers what works for each of your accounts and can actually produce the post, not just suggest ideas.

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🛠️ Core components

Component	Role
OpenClaw Agent	The LLM (Claude, GPT‑4o, etc.) that runs the reasoning and calls skills.
Account portrait	A folder (profiles/<name>/) storing positioning, style, audience, platform preferences and long‑term memory.
Skill library	113+ plug‑in‑style scripts (Python, shell, etc.) that perform concrete actions – e.g., generate an image, synthesize voice, edit video, check copyright, publish to a platform.
Web workbench	FastAPI + React UI (served on http://localhost:7860) that lets you manage conversations, assets, calendars, and publishing status.
Gateway	OpenClaw’s background service that routes the agent’s calls to the appropriate skill.

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🚀 Getting started (quick‑run)

1. Clone & run the installer – it checks Python 3.10+, Node 24+, Git, FFmpeg and Playwright. It also installs a dedicated OpenClaw profile called easel.

   git clone https://github.com/ZJU-REAL/Easel.git
   cd Easel
   bash setup.sh   # or .\setup.ps1 on Windows
   

2. Provide an LLM key in .env (Claude or OpenAI are supported). Example for Claude:

   ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=YOUR_KEY
   CLAUDE_MODEL=anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6
   

3. Activate the virtual environment and launch the UI:

   source .venv/bin/activate   # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
   easel web   # opens http://localhost:7860
   

4. Inside the UI you can create a new profile, run the hot‑spot radar, let the agent draft a post, generate the required media, and finally click Publish.

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🎯 Who would use this?

Use case	Why Easel helps
Individual creators	Saves time by automating research, copy‑writing, image/video generation and multi‑platform posting.
Small agencies / brand teams	One profile per client keeps style and audience memory separate while sharing the same underlying agent.
Researchers of AI‑augmented media	Provides a concrete, end‑to‑end pipeline to study how LLM‑driven agents perform in real‑world social‑media workflows.

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📦 What’s already implemented?

• Discovery – real‑time hot‑list aggregation, trend analysis, RSS feeds, competitor monitoring.
• Planning – audience analysis, persona building, topic scoring, calendar generation, cross‑platform reuse.
• Creation – text generation, style‑transfer, AI‑image generation, background removal, voice cloning, music synthesis, video stitching, subtitle translation, meme generation, etc.
• Publishing – login & posting to Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Kuaishou, Zhihu, B‑Station, WeChat Video, WeChat Official Account; includes a quality‑gate and copyright check.
• Attribution – pulls back view/interaction metrics and updates the profile’s memory for future cycles.

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📚 Documentation & community

• Skill map – docs/skill-function-mapping.md lists all 113 skills and the layer they belong to.
• Prompt stack – docs/prompt-stack.md explains how prompts are layered for the agent.
• Known issues – docs/known-issues.md (e.g., some terminal render quirks).
• WeChat group – QR code in the README for direct community chat.
• Roadmap – Windows‑native support, smoother installer, richer web‑agent interaction, support for other agent harnesses.

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⚖️ License

Apache 2.0 – free for commercial or academic use, with the usual attribution requirements.

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Bottom line: Easel is a genuine, research‑backed open‑source platform that combines a large‑language‑model agent with a rich set of media‑generation skills to automate the full life‑cycle of social‑media content creation, publishing, and performance feedback.