AI Is Terrible At Memes

Imgflip has an AI meme generator. I’ve tested it several times, and so far it has failed to impress me. Its extreme randomness, however, is sometimes entertaining. Let’s look at some memes I have generated.

Memes have become a cultural phenomenon, a form of digital communication that spreads virally and permeates social media. From Grumpy Cat to the Success Kid, memes have become a ubiquitous part of our online experience. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), it was only a matter of time before AI-generated memes entered the scene. However, while these memes may seem like a fun novelty at first glance, they lack the humor and originality of their human-generated counterparts.

One of the key appeals of memes is their relatability. They often draw on shared cultural references or experiences, and their humor often stems from a clever twist or subversion of expectations. While AI-generated memes may be able to mimic the structure and style of a traditional meme, they often lack the cultural awareness and contextual understanding needed to create truly relatable or humorous content.

Additionally, AI-generated memes often rely on the same set of pre-existing templates or templates generated from a specific dataset, leading to a lack of originality. This can make them feel repetitive or unoriginal, ultimately diminishing their impact and entertainment value.

Moreover, AI-generated memes can also perpetuate harmful stereotypes or offensive content, particularly when the algorithms are trained on biased or problematic data. Without the critical eye and moral judgment of a human creator, these memes can spread harmful or insensitive content that may be damaging to certain communities.

Of course, this is not to say that AI-generated memes can never be funny or entertaining. There have been some instances where AI-generated memes have garnered attention and humor, such as the popular “This Person Does Not Exist” meme. However, it is important to recognize the limitations and potential drawbacks of relying solely on AI to create memes.

In conclusion, while AI-generated memes may seem like a fun and novel way to explore the capabilities of artificial intelligence, they often lack the cultural awareness, originality, and humor of their human-generated counterparts. As we continue to integrate AI into our daily lives, it is important to remain critical of its limitations and potential biases, and to recognize the value of human creativity and humor in the digital landscape.

Here’s what imgflip says about their image generator:

Find a good one? Save it and submit it to the AI Memes stream!

These captions are generated by a deep artificial neural network. Nothing about the text generation is hardcoded, except that the maximum text length is limited for sanity. The model uses character-level prediction, so you can specify prefix text of one or more characters to influence the text generated. Using someone’s name or other short text as a prefix works best.

The network was trained using public images generated by users of the Imgflip Meme Generator for the top 48 most popular Meme Templates. Beware, no profanity filtering was done on the training data so you may encounter vulgarity.

Curious about the technical details of building the network? Check out the accompanying article Meme Text Generation with a Convolutional Network in Keras & Tensorflow.

Imgflip