https://www.linkedin.com/posts/emollick_i-regret-to-announce-that-the-meme-turing-activity-7307199008630816769-uHdp/
Via The Neuron
Turns out, AI models might be better at making memes than you are…
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| “New research just dropped that might have your favorite social media meme account sweatin’ like the Daily Struggle guy. |
| In their paper “One Does Not Simply Meme Alone” (10/10 title game), European researchers tested memes about work, food, and sports created by three groups: humans working alone, humans collaborating with AI, and AI working solo. |
| The results? Pretty surprising: |
- Memes generated entirely by AI scored highest across all three metrics (humor, creativity, shareability).
- Human-AI collaboration didn’t improve quality over humans working alone.
- BUT humans still created the funniest top-performing memes.
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| While AI memes did better on average at creating broadly appealing, middle-of-the-road content, the absolute best memes still came from humans (for humor) and human-AI teams (for creativity and shareability). |
| The researchers suggest this happens because language models are trained on massive datasets showing what broad audiences find funny—essentially optimized for “crowd-pleasing” humor. Corporate memes about to be AI-ified. |
| How they did it: The researchers prompted GPT-4o to “generate 20 meme captions for this [image] about the topic of [topic]” and designed their own UI where the AI helped generate caption ideas. |
| What’s also fascinating is that people who used AI assistance: |
- Generated significantly more ideas.
- Reported less effort to accomplish their tasks.
- Still felt ownership over their creations (though less than those working alone).
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| Our take: The future likely belongs to those who can effectively partner with AI tools rather than compete against them. This research mirrors what we’re seeing across other creative fields—AI’s sweet spot is rapidly producing solid, broadly appealing content. Put another way: AI content is mid. |
| This matters because memes help us cope. They’re not just funny content, but actually activate our brain’s empathy circuits and create shared experiences during stressful times—like, IDK, AI taking over the world?? |
| The real magic of memes isn’t their mass appeal—it’s that moment when you think, “omg, THIS! 1000%” because someone else just gets it. Good luck automating THAT at scale!” |
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