In 2022, fascinated by cutting-edge diffusion fine-tuning techniques, we joined forces with a small team of developers and dreamers to make Cheese, an entirely new kind of social network that asks - and answers - the question:
‘What if social media were
actually,
literally,
truly fake?’
All profiles on Cheese are populated exclusively with AI-generated images. Users have a private ‘camera roll’ of text-to-image generations from which they can choose to post publicly.
On the home feed, users can choose to hit a ‘Do Me’ button on any image they see, getting variations based on the same prompt but with their own likeness as the subject. Prompt creators are incentivized with app credits for every time someone ‘remixes’ their prompt.
When we put Cheese in front of users, people lost their minds - and weeks of their free time - to pure creative joy. Here’s what we heard:
”I can’t stop scrolling.”
”This is the most addictive app I have ever used.”
”This is the only social network I’ve ever been interested in.”
”Just lost a week of work to Cheesin’.”
”I’m hooked on that Cheese.”
”It’s going to start WWIII but it’s great.”
Of course, when designing a system like this, privacy and safety were top of mind. Our rules and terms were carefully considered to codify that users should own their likeness, and should be in full control of a model that is capable of making images of them.
• Users’ generations remain private until posted
• Users own their posted images and AI model
• Zero-tolerance policy for abuse
• Cheese can only generate images with users’ models for internal testing
We barely scratched the surface of our dream roadmap with this experiment. If you want to know more about AI image-making or our visions for AI-powered creativity, hit this contact link.
Cheese Team:
Product Concept and UXD: Noah Norman and Stephanie Lopez
Backend, Front End, ML R&D, and Cloud Orchestration: Paul Szerlip
Backend and Front End Dev: Evan Lee
Biz Advisor and Blue Ocean Research: Eric Rachlin
