It's not just because many Internet users are well-versed in the memes of the past. These videos with "time travelers" in memes are still pretty sloppy in depicting human faces and body parts accurately. For some people, it adds to the uncanny feeling that fuels instant rejection upon seeing such a video.
Perhaps we don't have to worry about AI rewriting the history of memes, but we should take note that it might get better than us at creating memes. Just this year, researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, LMU Munich in Germany, and TU Darmstadt in Germany found that people find AI-generated captions for memes funnier than human ones.
The AI didn't generate the memes themselves. Instead, the researchers used already popular memes like Doge, Futurama, and Boromir, from The Lord of the Rings. GPT-4o only generated the captions for them and performed better than the average human. "I regret to announce that the meme Turing Test has been passed," Wharton professor Ethan Mollick wrote, commenting on the study. AI vs human meme masters: 1-0?
