Hey guys, thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my app, MemeCam, an app that can understand the context of photos and generate relevant and funny captions for them.
The results are sometimes super funny, other times strange or completely awkward. It all depends on what you snap a picture of, and mood of the AI, I guess!
I was really excited to build this app, because I love memes and I love making people laugh even more.
Given the hefty cost of image captioning service I built the app with subscription at first. But we all hate subscriptions, so I changed it to be free with optional donation/tipping. There are ads which can be turned off with a one time fee, too. Hope this old-school model is still sustainable financially.
How does it work?
You snap a picture, which is sent to an image captioning service (Replicate) and based on the caption, it uses OpenAI to generate a meme for it.
You can get it here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/memecam-memes-by-ai/id6447441001
I would love to have your feedback!
Just wondering what’s actually happening behind the scenes here. I used it first with data/wifi enabled, it took around 40 seconds to process and caption a picture (raccoon image)
Then I turned on Airplane mode and used a different image (Kevin James) and it generated a captioned image instantly - so are there pre-baked captions written by you as well?
I think this is a brilliant idea for an app. It’s something that I didn’t know I wanted, but I do want. It once took me an hour to make one meme with my own tools. I know a couple of people who have made apps for iOS and I know that it is very hard so I’m proud of you for finishing your product and finding a way to monetize it without an initial subscription.
I know a couple of other people have mentioned that they don’t like giving their photos to Replicate, who does retain the user’s photos data. I appreciate you mentioning that you yourself nor your app harvests any data, which is great and seems to be written in good faith, but I do believe that having a short disclaimer in your app before creating the first post would afford the end user with a chance to make the decision for themselves if they want Replicate to harvest their photos or not. (Most people, will likely not care, like myself, but other users may have reservations.)
Some apps do a great job of presenting a disclaimer in a way that doesn’t frighten the end user but informs them in a short form sentence with a “learn more…” hyperlink near the bottom where the user can read in more detail about what replicate is and what the implications are from using your app. By implementing this, you are promoting transparency with a brief disclaimer that can either be quickly dismissed with an “ok” button or expanded with a “learn more…”.
Thank you for your thoughtful message. You are very right that including a disclaimer would be the best way to go about it.
I had the best intentions here, and seeing some of the critique it’s really a great opportunity to do better and keep improving how I manifest my ideas!
I think you’re doing awesome brother don’t mistake me: I’m sincerely proud I know how hard it is. Just keep swimming you’re almost at the finish line.
I got a ‘congratulations you broke the ai’
In my first attempt 😅
I’d love to see different meme formats. Specifically, the white banner above the image with plain text.
Thank you! Added to my todo list.
Great idea! Would love to be able to edit/move the text. Sometimes it would put the text on top of someone’s face if there was a person in the image.
Super cool concept! The captions were relevant. Cant wait to see how this develops further!
why would we give you our photos to feed into your database for free?
I appreciate the question. Neither the photos or even the resulting captions are stored in my database.
Aree they stored in the AI engine, cloud service you are using, or other third parties?
#PRIVACY
And even when they have the right ToS, somehow they get hacked or negligent or both
#SECURITY
Giving you your data to make memes should be a hard pass. Let alone developing an app to do that. Highly immoral from you OP, right after giants like 1Password, Sony or DNA data base 23andMe get hacked
Best
