I Used GPT-4.5 to Create an AI-Powered Cat Meme Generator for Fun and Profit

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As I recently shared, I’ve been testing a strategy from Niche Site Lady to grow a Facebook page to 20,000 followers for under $300.

ICYMI, here’s what I’m doing there:

It’s going very well! My page is at 18,000 Likes in just under a week. And, the page is in the Facebook Bonus Program. That means I can earn money directly on Facebook when people engage with content I post on the page.

What do people engage with most on Facebook? Cat memes!

I’ve tried posting religious content, food images, controversial topics and more on my new page. Nothing brings in the engagement quite as well as cat memes.

Seeing this, I realized something: I needed cat memes at scale.

So, I turned to the world’s most powerful AI system to create them. Here’s a video walkthrough, with more below:

GPT-4.5, Meme Creator Extraordinaire

OpenAI just released GPT-4.5 this week. It’s the most powerful AI system in the world right now. It’s also uniquely good at understanding human emotion and psychology.

That makes it the perfect tool for creating funny cat memes.

To build my meme generator, I used Python and integrated with the OpenAI API. I handed GPT-4.5 a prompt asking for 10 cat memes, with descriptions of both visuals and text.

To train the model, I also used the ChatGPT interface and worked with GPT-4.5 directly to come up with 10 funny sample memes, which I fed into GPT-4.5 to show it what I was looking for.

Next, I added code that takes the model’s output (as JSON, a standard way to move data around within programs), loops through each idea, and uses the Ideogram API to create the actual meme image.

I can click a button, and in about 30 seconds, I start getting memes like this, fully generated and saved to my PC:

And…

And,

There’s even some really avant garde ones in there:

I think you’ll agree, some of these are genuinely funny. They’re also quite realistic. Remember that all these cats and images are fully AI-generated—no real cats were harmed or inconvenienced in the making of these images.

The fun thing with this is that it’s extensible—I can feed in any topic, and instantly get an unlimited number of memes about it.

The Economics of Cat Memes

GPT-4.5 is an expensive model. It probably costs as much as $.25 to generate a list of 10 cat meme ideas.

Ideogram costs 5 cents per image to make these. So each cat meme is costing me about 7.5 cents to make.

There’s no set payment amount from the Facebook bonus program. But successful pages can get paid anywhere from $0.50 to hundreds of dollars for a really engaging post.

As long as my cat memes average out to more than about 10 cents generated per meme, I’m profitable!

Another nice thing here is that these are original images. I’m not reposting memes that have been shared elsewhere. I’m putting wholly new cat memes into the world. Not all heroes wear capes…

What it All Means

Is this the most impactful use of OpenAI’s new GPT-4.5 model? Probably not.

But, it does demonstrate some important things about the company’s new AI.

Firstly, GPT-4.5 is indeed quite good at understanding humans. Many of these memes are funny, and some (like the “Karen” one) work in clever references to pop culture.

Secondly, GPT-4.5 is reasonably scriptable and consistent. Yes, the API is expensive. But with good training, it outputs consistent data that I can use to feed the second part of the script without many errors or issues.

Lastly, I hope this shows that combining different AI models together can yield really stellar and novel results. Ideogram isn’t smart enough to generate funny cat memes on its own. But when you use GPT-4.5 as Ideogram’s “brain”, the two models working together are more powerful than the sum of their parts.

Check out my video to see more memes and the exact code/processes I’m using here: