What Are the Best AI-Generated Memes? - The New York Times

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What Are the Best AI-Generated Memes? - The New York Times

It may or may not alter the course of humanity, but at least the memes are fun. By Max Read July 11, 2023 The A.I. revolution has arrived. After decades of research and countless dead ends, machine learning applications have reached a power and capability once thought unimaginable: Anyone on the planet can now fire up a computer and make an MP3 in which a synthetic voice modeled on President Barack Obama’s says, “My fellow Americans, I am now a catboy.” At least, that’s how Arik Ahmed has been using A.I. Mr. Ahmed is the creator of a series of wildly popular scripted videos in which the A.I.-generated voices of the three most recent U.S. presidents chatter as they play rounds of the popular first-person shooter game Overwatch. “I thought it’d be funny,” Ahmed said of his creative inspiration. To make the voices for his videos, Mr. Ahmed uses an app called Prime Voice AI, the basic tier of which costs $5 per month. The process is shockingly simple: “I complete a script for my silly little videos, I make my quote-unquote characters say the lines with the A.I. tool, and then I edit it in Adobe Premiere,” Mr. Ahmed says. The result is an absurd and vulgar masterpiece of online content, a series of 45-second sketches in which near-perfect imitations of some of the world’s most recognizable voices trash-talk one another in impenetrable Overwatch jargon. Hearing an uncanny simulacrum of Donald J. Trump’s voice say, “That is so cap, Joe” — Generation Z slang for “you’re full of it” — was the moment I realized A.I. might be the greatest technology ever created for making extremely stupid jokes. Over the past year, Prime Voice AI and other so-called generative, or content-producing, A.I. apps like the image generator app Midjourney and the chatbot ChatGPT have opened up to public use. An urgent, prophetic tone has taken hold in the Twitter threads, Substack newsletters and hectoring newspaper columns through which the thought leaders of Silicon Valley speak to their audiences. Optimists cite scientific advances and other examples of human intelligence and machine intelligence augmenting each other, robots and people walking hand in hand toward the singularity. Critics point toward broken spam bots, mutant disinformation and Kafkaesque A.I. service interactions — human venality and dull machine competency joining forces to make the world confusing and shoddy. So, on one end, field-transforming progress; on the other, failed A.I. spam bots clogging Twitter with the message “I’m sorry, I cannot generate inappropriate or offensive content.” Perhaps instead we should imagine A.I. possibilities on a two-dimensional plot, where one axis runs from “machine stupidity” to “machine intelligence” and the other from “human stupidity to human intelligence.” And Mr. Ahmed’s videos? I’d put them in the lower right, the kind of stunning masterpiece you can produce when you combine cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology with advanced human stupidity. The lower-right and upper-left quadrants cover most of what the public has found so engaging about new generative A.I. apps. These quadrants promise neither spiritual transcendence nor existential doom. They are often enlightening and impressive, but also funny, pointless and gleefully stupid. They are what we might call — using the bowdlerized rendering of an unpublishable, extremely online idiom for “making dumb, purposeless jokes” — the Funposting Zone. Machine Intelligence, Human Stupidity Not just any A.I.-generated post deserves to be charted in the Funposting Zone. They are missing a key ingredient: the conceptual dementedness of average internet users. By contrast, observe a series of images posted to the funposting hot spot r/weirddalle, of bees “giving a press conference”: Or, elsewhere on Reddit, “Spider-Man from Ancient Rome”: As video-generating A.I. becomes more widespread, more extremely stupid videos will join extremely stupid images. The machines here are not quite as intelligent, as this disturbing video of “Will Smith eating spaghetti” suggests: Deeper into the quadrant, we can find creations even stupider and even more advanced. Near Mr. Ahmed in the lower right we might find a cluster of other creations that make similarly glorious and silly use of A.I. voice generators, like the series of videos in wh...