We were warned that robots would be coming for our jobs eventually, but no one could have predicted that the advent of artificial intelligence would hit the meme industry so hard. Yesterday, users on Twitter became aware of “This Meme Does Not Exist,” a new AI meme generator that uses a deep neural network to produce randomized, absurd captions for classic meme formats. The results (when they happen to make sense) are often much funnier than memes written by actual humans.
“Nothing about the text generation is hardcoded, except that the maximum text length is limited for sanity,” writes Imgflip founder Dylan Wenzlau who made the meme generator in the spring of 2019 and described the process of designing, coding, and testing his text generation model in this post. What was the intended goal of applying his computer science knowledge in this way? “Profit from AI-generated memes, obviously.”
Here’s some memes we got after playing around with it a bit:
We’re not sure if there is any profit in the picture for Wenzlau, but he’s at least given us a way to create some pretty bonkers images that will really only be funny to people whose brains have been severely poisoned by internet culture. And, for that, we thank him.
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