- Wombo AI is an app that generates celebrity images.
- Donald Trump, Drake and Travis Kelcy are causing a stir after posting photos of their pregnant bellies
- Yes, this is very stupid. So what?
While a cheesy AI-generated video of Donald Trump and Joe Biden discussing hardcore bands is incredibly funny, Apple's wacky new AI “Genmoji” is… do not have?
The more advanced generative AI gets, the more silly it somehow seems to make us laugh. Interesting, isn't it?
Almost exactly a year ago, Max Read wrote about AI being good for “fan posts” (a term that I think started out as inappropriate for a family-friendly newspaper). Read covered some of the early examples of AI that entertained us: the Pope in a puffer coat, Will Smith eating spaghetti. These examples were funny because they fit neatly on the matrix of human stupidity and machine intelligence: getting smart machines to do very stupid things.
While these “high human stupidity, high machine intelligence” jokes are great, there is also room for “high human stupidity, low machine intelligence” jokes. The best recent example was the bad Google AI search results that went viral, encouraging people to eat 1-2 rocks a day or put glue in their pizza.
A year is a long time in the world of AI, and I was interested to see if Reid's analysis of what makes a good AI joke had changed much — for example, Will Smith eating spaghetti no longer looks weird or creepy, but rather normal.
But the fact that generative AI is so much “better” than it was a year ago doesn't mean it's stopped being fun. In fact, it makes it easier to do stupid, ridiculous things.
This is why my Instagram has recently been plastered with videos of pregnant male celebrities like this one:
(We also highly recommend playing the video to hear the AI-generated song.)
Wombo AI began developing a consumer app in 2021 that generates funny, meme-style, social media-ready images.
The current app, Celeb Shot (soon to be renamed Wombo), focuses on adding your face to various photos with celebrities, making you look like a baby or with bigger muscles.
Wombo founder Ben-Zion Benkhin told me they stumbled upon this new virality by chance.
(Male pregnancy, or “mpreg,” is a common trope in fan fiction, and for some reason, particularly when it comes to Snape.) “We're always trying to experiment and make it topical,” Benkin said.
In fact, these mpreg videos have seen a huge increase in shares on Instagram and TikTok posts, as well as increased app downloads. Making silly work is good for business. (An app update is coming soon that lets you post photos of yourself proudly holding a pregnant Trump or Drake.)
I'm not sure what the “mpreg Travis Kelce is trending” posts mean for the future of AI or humanity. I suppose some of these silly posts are a coping mechanism for the scarier parts of AI. Sure, AI might kill us all one day, but at least we had some good memes.
