Andrew Heinzman
Like most people, I have absolutely no sense of impulse control. I’m full of potential, but I get distracted by shiny things. Last week I spent my grocery money on a copyright-infringing Nintendo Switch decal. And today, after warnings from my editor and co-writers, I wasted four or five hours pressing the refresh button on an AI meme generator.
There’s a lot of work I could’ve done this morning. But I ran into K. Thor Jensen’s Twitter post about the meme generator and fell into some sort of time loop. The imgflip meme generator is intoxicating in a way that’s difficult to describe. You just pick a meme format, hit the refresh button, and watch the AI come up with surreal, nonsense images.
Not bad, eh? You have to refresh the AI a few times before it comes up with something good. In a way, working with the meme generator is like listening to a playlist that your friend made. It’s mostly awful, but the good parts are good.
You can even type out a few words for the meme generator to work with—sort of like improv, but actually funny. I spent an unhealthy amount of time forcing the meme generator to come up with memes for the word “poop,” and I think that this one, with its enlightening grasp of morality and the fall of ethics, is my favorite:
Alright, it looks like I’m running out of time. Hopefully, this article makes up for the hours I’ve wasted staring at AI-generated memes. If there’s anything to take away from this, dear reader, it’s that you should avoid using the AI meme generator—wait, you’ve already opened it? Oh well, not my problem.
