Gboard's AI Meme Generator Aims To Take Over Humanity's Most Sacred Online Contributions

Contents

Summary

Google is developing an AI meme generator as a Gboard feature with manual and automatic modes.
The feature, “meme studio,” clearly doesn’t understand memes well, and struggles to create coherent image macros.
At this stage of development, it’s not yet clear what the target market for a Gboard AI meme generator is.

The word “meme” first arose in Richard Dawkins’ 1976 The Selfish Gene to describe a part of culture or example of behavior passed on socially through imitation or additional ways other than genetics. But that’s not what it usually means in 2025. Originally called image macros, today’s memes consist of text overlaid on pictures to illustrate a sometimes serious, always partially humorous point.

Well, sometimes they’re humorous. Everybody’s encountered bad memes before. Soon, Google might encourage you to leverage AI within Gboard to automatically generate memes. Gboard, overall, is great, and one of the most popular Android keyboards for a reason. So far, however, the in-development tool’s output appears to be even more nonsensical than human-created memes, according to a Google source that spoke with Android Authority. And that’s saying something.

Vault 35 HHKB laying on two mats looking dope as all heck

Still in development, what Google internally calls “meme studio” has two aspects. At this point, the manual option is pretty straightforward, although not particularly in-depth or customizable. Its selection of background images isn’t huge, but that’s easily remedied. It also doesn’t let you adjust font or text color, but those relatively trivial tools should be pretty easy to shoehorn in by launch time.

But that’s just a bog-standard meme creation tool. The real (supposed) magic comes from the “generate” side of the feature. You can choose a recommended text prompt or provide your own. It fires the prompt off to Google servers, at which point the AI does its thing. And, apparently, AI’s thing doesn’t yet include memes that make any sense whatsoever.

I’m guessing Google mostly made this feature for older people, but I feel it’s not even that great for that purpose. — Kamila Wojciechowska, Android Authority

I’m not one to rip on Google just for fun (well, usually), but the experience of Android Authority’s Kamila Wojciechowska indicates the feature is leagues away from being ready for primetime. The unavoidable, ever-changing filters on AI output might do a decent job restricting harmful content, but also get in the way of plenty of prompts that have zero ill intentions.

Courtesy of Kamila Wojciechowska of Android Authority. The “Prison Mike modem power” meme is chuckle-worthy, but for the wrong reasons.

Beyond the inconsistency of prompts getting squashed or making it through, the memes from Gboard’s early testing simply aren’t any good. They don’t turn out funny, express meaningful points, mimic actual human thoughts, or make much sense at all. To be fair, the feature is still in development, and could be able to generate competent, hilarious memes by the time it goes public.

On the other hand, we are talking about AI. It could be years before artifical intelligence can truly, accurately imitate the natural unintelligence of hairless apes — especially on the level of those of us who post memes for fun.