By David Futrelle
You may have noticed a strange explosion of highly surreal memes hitting your Twitter home page of late. Blame the Artificial Intelligence-powered meme generator that you can find here, which will happily generate as many weird and baffling memes as you could ever want.
Now, the meme generator is a fairly basic thing, in principle: it takes in hundreds (thousands?) of human-generated memes in a variety of formats before pooping out something it doesn’t understand, but that we humans might.
Given that the AI-meme-generator literally doesn’t know what it’s saying, most of the memes it puts out tend to be a bit puzzling:
And sometimes it doesn’t seem to understand the meme format at all:
But alongside the surreal memes, the AI-meme-generator somehow manages to spit out others that make perfect (or at least only slightly imperfect) sense. I’ve been fiddling around with it for awhile and have been surprised and intrigued by these memes, which seem very much like the memes an actual human might produce on their own.
Indeed, these memes make a lot more sense than many if not most of the Men’s Rights memes I’ve run across (and written about) over the years — despite the fact that the MRA memes were generated by actual human beings who, at least in theory, should know what they’re saying.
Let’s look at examples from both genres — contrasting some of my, er, favorite MRA memes with memes the AI-meme-generator made for me.
Let’s start with this authentic MRA meme:
Apparently the thought process behind this, er, hilarity is: “Women are stupid! And rape is funny! Sharks!”
This AI-generated meme makes a lot more sense:
I mean, who doesn’t enjoy a nice hot dog once in a while?
Here’s an MRA meme taking aim at women in the military:
Contrast that with this cheerful and wholesome AI-generated meme:
Again, the AI hits the nail on the head. Everyone loves to see people talking about their cool stuff.
Here’s a dark and bewildering MRA meme:
I suppose the message here is supposed to be “even if she says she’s not a feminist, she might secretly be one, and falsely accuse you of rape.” But I’m not sure anyone not steeped in MRA-talk could discern that.
Also, why is “radical/white” in ironic quotes?
By contrast, this next AI-generated meme, while admittedly rude and perhaps a bit sexist, is as clear as a (school) bell.
This MRA meme may leave you scratching at your head as you try to puzzle out its strange “logic.”
This AI meme, by contrast, makes so much sense it hurts.
In the world we live in today, who has the patience to wait until you get home to get sloshed?
So why are MRA memes so illogical and incomprehensible? Part of the problem is that reality is not on their side, and so many of their memes only make sense if you’re already living in the imaginary world of the Men’s Rights movement, where black is white and mean, bitchy women rule over all. I know enough about this world from the many years I’ve spent doing this blog that I can usually make some sort of sense of most of their memes, but I still struggle with some of them. It doesn’t help much that many MRAs are bitter bastards choking on their own aggrieved entitlement; their attempts at jokes are undercut by their meanness and their barely developed sense of humor.
The AI may not have a sense of humor, but it’s also unencumbered by all this baggage, so when it pops out with something that’s funny, it’s genuinely funny.
Congratulations, MRA; it’s official now: You’ve failed the Turing test.
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The most nonsensical kind of trolling is when they spend all their time telling their trolling targets some version of “I’m too good to talk to you.”
First of all, what does it even accomplish?
Second of all, if the troll really thought they were good to engage with their trolling targets, they just wouldn’t post at all. I mean, I know I wouldn’t lower myself to post at all in Breitbart’s comments sections. Why waste my time?
A Man’s Whine trolling score?
Seriously, what is it with liberal millennial women and those stupid pop culture gifs? I don’t get it. I guess we can probably trace it back to Buzzfeed, but I didn’t really get it there either. What do they ever add to the conversation?
@Manvoice
See, I knew you could elaborate on things you said before. That’s great! Could you please answer previous questions about looksmatching for same-sex couples and explain the context of your comment about women being not decent? That would be even better!
And regarding the gif thing (totally only ever used by women!), you don’t really add much to the conversation either, but here you are.
Oh, BoysHavering (sorry, no, lets just go with manly manly MansVoice, so frightfully manly one is positively in awe) thinks we’re millennials! That’s actually pretty funny (well, it raised a chuckle, anyway).
@opposablethumbs – Well, I think WWTH is a millennial, because she’s posting those dumb pop culture gifs that only millennials ever use. Am I wrong? (No.)
(If she were a Boomer, she’d be posting left-wing chart brut.)
A Man’s Whine,
A picture is worth a thousand words. That’s not a new concept. It’s only quickly popping a gif into a comment box that’s new.
Also, the majority of the time, I only use gifs to respond directly to someone when they’re a particularly sad sack troll. For one thing, they tend to annoy you. For another, a long wall of text is more effort than I care to spend on you.
@dipshit
Considering that I annihilated your stupid, stupid, stupid “science” article as the opposite of science, and you totally ceded that, I’m sure any lurkers still knocking about this thread have formed an opinion about you from which you can’t, at this point, recover. It’s too late for you.
@MansVoice
You got rather annoyed with the song that isn’t literally about this very moment, but you like the metaphor of The Matrix being applied counter to its original intent.
@Masse_mysteria
MansVoice, yes please do this.
Considering that I annihilated your stupid, stupid, stupid “science” article as the opposite of science, and you totally ceded that
You didn’t, and I didn’t. I just trust that most normal people will see that your argument was bad. If you had made a better one, I would have engaged you more directly. (Though as I said earlier, I did effectively respond to your criticism, albeit pre-emptively – obviously you weren’t able to locate that post, but again, I don’t care what you think.)
I also posted reasonable critiques of that “science” article which were similarly ignored. Not much of a point in continuing to respond in anything other than gifs and/or mockery if the more measured posts don’t get a real response.
Yes, I did, and you did cede the issue by not bothering to respond to it. The lurkers you want to win over know the truth, dude. You’re not a scientist and wouldn’t know science from a lemon.
@MansVoice
So you wouldn’t even want to amuse the lurkers by pointing out what was wrong with the arguments? I bet many of them were all “Ooh, I want to see what he says to this one!” and just got nothing. I pity the poor lurkers who were all rooting for you, and had to see you seemingly concede the point by not addressing it.
Before you said you’d done it implicitly. Are there other words you’d like to use instead of “not at all”?
ETA: So basically what PoM said.
@Masse_Mysteria:
Before you said you’d done it implicitly. Are there other words you’d like to use instead of “not at all”?
It can be both, you know.
But also, I’m officially bored with this weird meta-argument.
I’ve been bored with you since I realized you had no comeback for me whatsoever. Trolls are amusing when they try to ape intelligent people, but you just step back and claim victory after having done nothing. It’s like you never matured out of third grade.
@MansVoice
Both “implicitly” and “not at all”? Honestly, I would never have guessed that.
Are you about ready to tell us why you comment during the work week?
I notice that the troll has forgotten about Generation X.
@Policy of Madness
Well, I’m chuckling at his apparent belief that this board is dominated by liberal millennial women. So he’s got at least that much entertainment value. But that’s not much.
ETA: LindsayIrene, yeah, I noticed that, too.
But he already did:
@Victorious Parasol
It goes paired with his belief that we are all unemployed. There’s a lot to unpack in that, but I can’t be bothered to do that kind of work for someone who won’t appreciate it.
@Policy of Madness
I hear that. Besides, a lot of his stuff doesn’t need to be unpacked, just looked at for more than 2 seconds.
@Victorious Parasol
You’re right in that most of what he says is about as deep as a wafer of mica, but every now and then he says something that is laden with preconceptions and assumptions, and it’s my instinct to look critically at stuff like this.
Oi, got a bit to catch up on, having been busy…
@Snowberry, Naglfar, regarding cryonics, et al:
Fictionally, there was an interesting story called ‘Between the Strokes of Night’ which involved slowing down biological processes massively to something like 1/2000th normal. Interstellar trips would take decades, but the slowed down crew would perceive it as days. Needless to say, most of the ship was actually run by robots, because there was no way the humans could react fast enough. Ships operated under microgravity so things like falling speed would ‘seem’ normal.
Also, needless to say, in the real world chemistry doesn’t work that way.
@Alan, regarding cosmic jets:
It was actually one of the interesting early validations of relativity: some highly unstable particles generated via cosmic ray interactions in the upper atmosphere could survive to the ground level for detection because they were moving so close to the speed of light that not enough time had passed for them to actually decay yet.
@MansVoice, regarding Elon Musk:
Musk is a man who is so convinced of his own genius and so thin-skinned that he deliberately set out to trash the reputation of an expert in rescue operations because said expert slighted Musk by saying they didn’t need the unbuilt, untested, and even on paper unworkable equipment he suggested. I appreciate that he is spending at least some of his money on big-ticket items that nobody else with enough resources is pushing, but the man needs a serious dose of humility.
(And if the cycle of history repeats, Tesla’s days are probably numbered anyway. Now that it’s been proven to be doable, the big auto manufacturers with lots more manufacturing capability and connections are already moving in.)
Also, Slate Star Codex… ahh, that takes me back. A friend of mine used to mine there for story ideas, because they came up with such interesting thoughts that were rarely followed through well.
@Victorious Parasol regarding ‘The Lurkers Support Me in Email’:
Ahh, I remember that Jo Walton song. Don’t think I’ve ever heard her sing it, though I have met and talked with her a few times. (She runs a convention called Scintillation in Montreal, and I’ve been to both the times it has run so far. We’ll see if it happens this year.)
@Alan, regarding math songs:
I got beat multiple times over for New Math; of course, as both a songwriter and a math prodigy (and later professor) that shouldn’t have been a surprise from him. Lehrer did a few educational songs like that, one of the other famous ones being ‘Silent E’ which was on the old ‘The Electric Company’ TV show, for which he actually wrote something like ten songs.
I don’t know that They Might Be Giants have done any specifically math songs, but they have a tendency to do about one ‘educational’ song per album, the most famous being ‘Why Does the Sun Shine?’ (aka ‘The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas’, later reworked as ‘The Sun is a Miasma of Incandescent Plasma’). They Might be Giants have done a couple of children’s albums that tended more towards silly but educational songs.
For that matter, Canadian band Moxy Früvous did a song called ‘Entropy’ which describes the first and second laws of thermodynamics:
I am strongly reminded of the metaphor involving trying to play chess with a pigeon.
But you did engage with it. Saying “Nope” is engaging with it.
Some of these aren’t even MRA memes