Culture

We’re In Awe Of This AI Meme Generator, Which Is Pumping Out Absurdly Perfect Memes

Considering how 2020 is going, these memes' lack of sense makes perfect sense.

by Jared Richards  30 April 2020
AI Meme Generator's best memes

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Richard Dawkins is shaking: memes have become sentient thanks to Imgflip’s AI meme generator, proving that comedy, of all things, will be the first industry to be completely automated.

‘Hotline Bling’ Drake rejecting straight people for gays; the buff American Chopper cast yelling about being a meme; the brain-exploding moment that you realise you are a bitch. None of these quite make sense, but there’s something here that appeals to our ever-online brains and the general simulation glitch of 2020.

Of course an AI would make perfect memes. Nothing makes sense, anyway.

Called ‘This Meme Does Not Exist’, Imgflip’s AI generator works via a combination of 48 popular meme formats and 960,000 captions, trawling through to build them character by character, rather than by word.

Imgflip founder Dylan Wenzlau goes through the specifics in a blog post, but essentially explains that there are ~45,000,000 training examples for the AI to play with, essentially producing endless variations of our own memes.

The result is akin to looking at a new meme format that references a sub-sub culture of the internet you don’t understand, which has then been fed through Google translate — aka what it’s like to be Alex Bluman of Reply All‘s ‘Yes Yes No’, where the podcast’s meme literate hosts explain a Tweet to him that previously seems like a jumble of words.

Users do have some say in the generation, picking the meme format and potential prefixes to help along the AI, though at the time of writing, the prefix feature was shut down due to the expensive surge in traffic. Meme formats are a mix of classics and new favourites, including. ‘distracted boyfriend’, ‘Doge’, ‘surprised Pikachu’, ‘suspicious Fry’ and ‘is this an X?”

Equal parts postmodern art and a waste of time, the generator has found a loving audience in the last day or so on Twitter, where people are sharing their favourite non-meme memes, created from digital detritus.

Find some examples below, and then go create your own.