Former TikTok execs built an app that uses AI to teach you how to pose for a photo
TechCrunch Ivan Mehta
Two ex-TikTok staff built an iPhone app that uses AI to suggest poses for photos. It’s betting people want better portraits, not fake backgrounds.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Ivan Mehta — read the original for the full story.
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AI photo tools keep drifting from editing toward coaching. Google has already tried this with Camera Coach on Pixel phones, and Adobe recently added an AI feature in its experimental camera app that critiques photos before they’re taken. Now two former TikTok employees, Melody Chu and Jing Liu, are pushing that idea into a new iOS app called Superpose.
Superpose is basically a camera app with a pose tutor bolted on. Take a selfie or shoot a friend, and it generates four possible poses. Some look dramatic, some look plain odd, and Chu admits the results can feel uncanny. Users can save a pose they like or use a match-pose tool to try to line up with the app’s suggestions.
Chu’s route into the startup is almost painfully relatable: her husband, she said, was terrible at taking photos of her. That annoyance turned into the company’s pitch, which is that computer vision and generative AI can help regular people get a better picture instead of just hoping for luck. Before starting Superpose, Chu worked in product roles at Meta, Nextdoor, Roblox, TikTok, and Slack. Liu had been a founding engineer at a 3D face-scanning startup and later worked on image and video models at TikTok.
The app launched in July and has been downloaded more than 22,000 times. Superpose says users have generated over 190,000 poses so far. It gives away five generations a day, then charges $2.99 for five more or $9.99 for 20.
The bigger point is where the company says it wants to stop. Superpose doesn’t want to become another app for synthetic backdrops or fantasy scenes. Chu says the focus is real-life photography and better memory capture, with the company working on style improvements, personalization, and coaching from the viewfinder itself. That puts it in a crowded little corner of AI, but at least it’s a corner with a clear reason to exist: some photos are terrible, and sometimes the problem really is the person holding the phone.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is one of the more believable AI app ideas out there, which is already a relief. It helps that Superpose is aiming at real photos instead of the usual inflatable castle of fake scenes and vibes. Still, the industry’s new favorite trick seems to be telling people how to look less awkward, which is just the old social pressure stack with better autocomplete.
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