X

These AI-generated memes are bizarre and profound at the same time

Mostly they make no sense, but some will mess with entire whole world view.

Mark Serrels Editorial Director
Mark Serrels is an award-winning Senior Editorial Director focused on all things culture. He covers TV, movies, anime, video games and whatever weird things are happening on the internet. He especially likes to write about the hardships of being a parent in the age of memes, Minecraft and Fortnite. Definitely don't follow him on Twitter.
Mark Serrels

For an entire generation reared in the murky dark corners of the internet, memes are the preferred mode of communication. They help us deal with catastrophic events and manage existential dread; they can even help shape the spread of diseases like the coronavirus. They keep us sane in troubled times.

But what happens when you remove the human element of memes and have an AI create them instead?
Chaos. That's what. Beautiful chaos.

screen-shot-2020-04-30-at-1-52-02-pm.png
Imgflip

Imgflip has created an AI that generates captions for some of the most popular memes of the last decade and beyond. They're disarmingly good, but also weird enough to create that uncanny valley sensation.  
Sometimes they almost work...

screen-shot-2020-04-30-at-2-00-41-pm.png
Imgflip

And sometimes they make zero sense whatsoever.

screen-shot-2020-04-30-at-2-02-28-pm.png
Imgflip

But plenty of folks online have had great success in using the generator to create incredibly bizarre and often profound memes.

The AI was trained using public images generated by users of the Imgflip Meme Generator. An entire article on how the AI was developed can be found here.  

In the meantime, I'll just leave y'all with this...

3z3yej