Creative Collaborator: AI-facilitated UI for Creating Engaging and Insightful Memes

Abstract

Memes have become a prevalent part of digital culture, transcending their origins as simple internet jokes to become powerful tools for communication, social commentary, and even education. Their social and cultural use is diverse, serving as a universal language for expressing complex ideas, fostering community, and providing a platform for social critique. Studies such as Tidy et al. (2024) and Brown (2020) have highlighted the educational potential of memes in STEM fields, demonstrating their effectiveness in simplifying complex concepts and engaging students. Platforms for meme creation have the potential to develop an environment that boosts the meme-making process.Existing platforms (i.e. imgflip.com, an online free memes generator) rely entirely on user input and do very little to guide the users in memes creation. Traditional user interfaces of memes generators are simple and easy to operate, but no contextual authoring support, which may limit the creative potential and content construction. Thus, we hypothesize that AI can expedite the creative process by presenting relevant meme templates, and generating suggested captions, acting as a “creative collaborator” for users. In this work, we explore utilizing OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 to facilitate the creation of educational and engaging memes, leveraging its ability to generate humorous and informative content.To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted a comparative case study with Imgflip’s free online meme generator. Participants created waste management related memes using both tools, and we assessed their productivity, creativity, and satisfaction. Qualitative feedback revealed the AI tool's LLM capabilities, hints, and instructions as key drivers of its enhanced performance. These findings highlight the potential of AI to revolutionize meme creation and inform the development of future user interfaces that leverage AI to enhance creativity, engagement, and educational impact.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, User Interface, User Experience, Human Computer Interaction, Creativite Collaborator, Memes

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1005579