Prisma adds to its armoury, integrating GagBot’s AI meme-generator

Ever get stuck for that perfect gag-line on a photo of your friends? You want to turn even an ordinary photo into an internet meme, but maybe you just can’t think of that hilarious caption. Well, now you too can outsource your creative brain to the coming Artificial Intelligence overlords. Yes, indeed there is an app for that.

Now Prisma — the photo-editing application that utilizes a neural network and AI to give artistic effect to an image — has integrated a startup’s AI to complement it’s growing list of tools. It’s clearly part of their ongoing strategy. Back in July Prisma launched Sticky, which turns selfies into stylized and/or animated stickers for sharing to your social feeds.

Sharing memes is a big trend but it helps if you have a sense of humor to create them. Now you can get an AI to suggest those clever quotes you might not come up with because Prisma is integrating the tool from a meme-generator app, GagBot.

GagBot uses AI and object recognition to automatically generate custom memes based on the content of a user’s photos. You upload a photo, and the AI use semantic analysis to create original quotes based on the content in the picture.

GagBot has recently raised a $500,000 funding round lead by AltaIR Capital and including angel investors. In recent times meme sites have become huge: 9GAG, the Hong Kong based social site; iFunny is huge an internet humor site; and Imgur is now a stalwart of these kinds of entertainment sites.

In a statement , Prisma CEO and co-founder Alexey Moiseenkov said: “Prisma has already expanded to video and selfie stickers, but now we’d like to offer an impressive artificial intelligence services to our users. We see a lot of opportunities in Gagbot and we believe it will help to produce a greater user experience with AI — helping people to communicate easier”.

“Despite AI breaking into our lives more and more, for most of us it still remains alien. We wanted to connect AI with people and to show how it can be used in our daily life. That’s how we came up with the idea to teach AI to create memes. We all get dozens of memes a day from our friends, but not all of them are really funny, and many of them we’ve already seen on different resources. Gagbot helps to create unique content without any effort. You do not even need to have wit, AI will do everything for you” said Viktor Mangazeev, Gagbot co-founder.

So, there goes human creativity guys…

“AI and its applications is something AltaIR Capital focuses on. Coupled with the popularity of imaging technology in social media, by combining the two, GagBot created a unique product that has a lot of potential,” commented Igor Ryabenkiy, AltaIR Capital partner.

The Gagbot team consists of Ivan Novikov, an AI expert, an CEO of Wallarm, a “next gen” web security solution. Wallarm raised $2.3 million after going through the Y Combinator from Partech Ventures, along with $500,000 USD seed investment from Runa Capital. Viktor Mangazeev, CEO of uTrener – a daily mobile fantasy sports operator, that raised $2 million from group of angel investors. Also co-founding is Anastasia Shvetsova, a PR professional and former journalist who has worked with WeWork, Houzz, HotelTonight, Facebook, Instagram, Paypal among other companies.

It’s interesting to note this move from Prisma, as it’s clearly trying to become the go-to company for all these meme-generation tools.

It recently shifted focus onto the b2b space, building tools for developers that draw on its expertise using neural networks and deep learning technology to power visual effects on mobile devices. It’s launched a new website, Prismalabs.ai, detailing this new offering.

Published at Mon, 04 Dec 2017 11:45:38 +0000