Google is working on an AI meme generator for Gboard and it’s horrible

As a proud Gen-Zer, I enjoy memes quite a lot, so when I found out that Google is working on an AI-powered meme generator for Gboard, I was excited to try it. The feature promises to take a prompt, pick a base image, and write a fitting caption for it. Even though current AI is still just glorified autocorrect, it seems good enough that it should be able to generate memes just fine. Unfortunately, in reality, the end product is downright terrible.

Thanks to a source inside Google, was able to explore an in-development version of the feature.

Google’s idea of what a meme should be

The idea behind the “meme studio” (as it’s called internally at Google) is to let users create memes in a simple way. There are two options available — the first is “custom,” which lets you pick a base image and write your own captions.

After picking a base image, it’s brought in to the editor. It is pretty rudimentary, only allowing moving, rotating, and the scaling of text, as well as adding extra captions. The font and the color of the text cannot be changed. When you’re done, you can save your creation to the collection in Gboard, or send it (which also saves it).

The much more interesting option is “generate,” where you ask AI to pick the base image and generate the captions based on a topic. There are a few suggestions to choose from and a field to write one from scratch. The feature is server-side, requiring an internet connection.

After picking a topic, the request will be processed. What’s intriguing is that the loading spinner doesn’t resemble any current Material You components and could be a part of “BC25” or “bluechip 25,” a potential refresh to Material You. We’ve also seen it referred to as “expressive design.”

Finally, you’re presented with several options. After picking one, you’re taken to the same editor as before, except with an option to regenerate the caption.

The feature obviously has advanced safeguards and filters in place, to avoid explicit or offensive content. Unfortunately, a lot of innocuous requests also get caught in the filter, resulting in no results being generated.

Yeah, no

The quality of the memes generated by the tool is questionable at best. As a young person who spends around 3 hours on Twitter (I refuse to call it X), I am familiar with the culture and humor of my generation, and it’s definitely not like this. I feel like the only way this could be used is for making ironically bad memes, but that’s it. The filtering also makes it hard to actually create something interesting, and the lack of options in the editor doesn’t help either. Memes always evolve, and these days, they often play with the format or make meta changes. Being limited to one font and format makes it basically impossible for this feature to be useful.

I’m guessing Google mostly made this feature for older people, but I feel it’s not even that great for that purpose. The base image picked by AI rarely makes any sense in the context of the caption; it often seems entirely random. The quality of the generated captions is also mediocre at best. It’s worth remembering this is an early version of the feature, so that might still improve — if meme studio ever launches at all.

Below is a random selection of memes I generated while testing the feature. I hope it makes you laugh (it won’t).

Hopefully, Google will improve the quality of this feature before it considers launching it. At this time, we don’t know when it’s intended to arrive.