This article was published on April 29, 2020

This AI-driven meme generator delivers the avant-garde content you need

Evidence that computers are capable of producing *art*


This AI-driven meme generator delivers the avant-garde content you need

I’m going to solve some pretty big things here for you. First off, memes are art. Secondly, computers are capable of creating art.

How do I know this? Easy — because of this AI-driven meme generator. God, that was smooth.

ai meme generator batman robin

Anyway, the folks over at Imgflip created something called This Meme Does Not Exist, a meme generator powered by a deep artificial neural network.

I was alerted to its existence when one of my friends (shout out you, Ruby) sent me this magnificent Tweet by K. Thor Jensen:

And, as I’m sure you’re well aware of by now, it’s amazing.

imgflip ai meme generator galaxy brain

How does this AI meme generator work?

Well, there’s an in-depth description of how they created this pivotal moment in human history here, but we’ll sum up the salient points for you.

Imgflip has a meme generator on its website where users can easily create pieces of art using popular templates. At the time of writing, there have been over 100M images made using this tool — a huge dataset to work from.

Rather than try and crunch all this at once, the team selected the 48 most popular meme templates, then fed the algorithm 20,000 examples from each. And for you, the reader, this led to our current glorious situation where a computer can generate you a piece of art.

this meme does not exist screaming

The name of the scheme (This Is Not A Meme) is a reference to the multitude of projects — like This Person Does Not Exist, or This Cat Does Not Exist — that use AI to create new images.

Basically, I just love everything about this AI meme generator project. Something about the borderline nonsensical nature of these examples hits me just right. I almost understand them, but they’re all off-kilter and bizarre, which somehow makes them all the more brilliant.

Ugh, marry me.

Anyway, what’s left to say? Just make sure you’re ready to waste the next few hours of your life and click here. Remember though, you’re witnessing art.

ai meme generator epic handshake

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.

Also tagged with