Is an AI app that makes you look pregnant while shaking hands with Donald Trump the future of entertainment?
What happened: Wombo, a Toronto-based generative AI startup, secured a US$9 million dollar funding round. Led by Round13 Digital Asset Fund, the round also had participation from chip giant Nvidia and AI infrastructure startup CoreWeave.
Catch-up: Wombo doesn’t use the word deepfake, but the Wombo Meme app fits the definition: AI-generated images of celebrities and public figures. Right now it is focused on the U.S. election, promoting images of a cleavage-showing Kamala Harris or a muscular, shirtless Trump sitting on Elon Musk’s lap.
- Wombo got its start with a lip sync app that could turn still images — of yourself or others — into videos singing along to a song.
- The company’s other app, Wombo Dream, is a more straightforward AI image generator, creating images in different art styles with a text prompt.
Why it matters: Deepfakes and disinformation are a big concern in AI. But as OpenAI and Google put guardrails around generating images of real people or deceptive election content, Wombo proudly touts its ability to make election memes from fake images.
What they’re saying: Ben-Zion Benkhin, Wombo’s CEO, tells Peak Tech that the content on Wombo Meme are clearly jokes and users are tied to certain templates — by leaning into the silliness, Wombo maintains no one could mistake its content for a real image.
- We got Wombo Dream to generate images like Justin Trudeau taking a bribe from Drake and Donald Trump pointing a gun in the distance, but as Benkhin says, they do look obviously fake.
- Should pending laws limit the kind of content it can generate, Benkhin says the company would gladly stop and move on to something else.
Zoom out: In the short-term, Wombo has been using AI to chase viral moments, seemingly feeding into “AI slop” that blurs the line between spam and content. But long-term, Benkhin claims Wombo’s popularity is a proof point for where entertainment is heading — fully customized and personalized entertainment people create themselves.