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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Flounce? What are you two on about?
Speaking of flounces, Graham Linehan has finally gotten himself into some trouble. His account is locked and he can’t post until he removes some especially awful tweets, which he’s refusing to remove. It’s not the same as being banned, but it’s had him jammed up for the past 24 hours with no signs of change. Couple that with the fact that his wife seems to have left him (she has changed her screen name back to her maiden name, and he was spotted a few weeks ago buying a new kitchen set), and it looks like he’s unraveling quickly.
@MansVoice
We’re talking about you. I thought you said you had important man-work to do and couldn’t be bothered to see us.
A Voice For Men,
You said you were leaving for good ( a flounce) and then you came back (failing to stick said flounce)
Heartwarming (ish) story of the day: my neighbour up north had a dog who was super mean to everyone except him. Apparently last year the dog bit a girl, and so was taken away to be euthanized.
Today, my ex noticed a dog that looks exactly like the old dog, hanging out with the neighbour’s other dog as if he belonged there. But this new dog being very nice to everyone, and just generally being a cute puppy.
She posted, found the owner, who came to pick up her dog… who has the same name as the old dog. And who she adopted last year.
So… seems like the old dog just needed a better home. And somebody gave him that chance.
@ numerobis
No ish about it; that’s lovely!
(I’m very much of the school that there are no bad dogs; only bad owners.)
I wonder if MansVoice has any more hilariously poorly designed … err … high school homework assignments to share.
@Weirwoodtreehugger –
I did not say I was leaving for good. I have a job – not that I expect you to relate to that – and excused myself from the thread because I had to prepare for what I knew would be a long week.
That week is now over, so I decided to check back in.
Restocked your lube and kleenex, did you?
A Man’s Whine,
You said you were leaving and not coming back. You came back.
Cooked any good seagulls lately?
A couple of articles relating to racial and class inequality, one also involving the virus:
“The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying”
https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/611389/
“The New Passport-Poor”
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/05/21/the-new-passport-poor/
I love how so many trolls think they’re the only people that have to actually earn a living. I guess the rest of us are living in the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
You’re right. It’s hard to relate to being so narcissistic that you assume you’re the only person here with a job, or any sort of weekday obligations.
You said you were leaving and not coming back. You came back.
I said I would “probably not be back” to that thread. To be clear, I meant that particular conversation. Perhaps that was unclear, but also, maybe you should stop hunting for ridiculous gotchas.
Cooked any good seagulls lately?
?
You’re right. It’s hard to relate to being so narcissistic that you assume you’re the only person here with a job, or any sort of weekday obligations.
I mean, idk. You all certainly seem to have a lot of spare time to spend posting on this site in the middle of the workday.
We operate on all time zones. The sun never sets over vast circumpolar mammoth steppe.
For what it’s worth, I also interpreted it like this. It sounded like an excuse to disappear, but not a literal announcement of going away.
I mean, ok. If A Man’s Wank really wants to be a chew toy, fine with me.
@Naglfar
Aw, shucks! It couldn’t have happened to a muckier piece of pond scum. I hope he hates every moment of his little time-out.
Anyways I’m really glad that MansVoice is back to tell us more about how women can only be considered decent if we boink our designated boinkbuds. I feel that this topic has yet to be fully explored.
Edit: Designated by him, ofc.
@MansVoice
And yet you seemed to know the flounce was all about you.
@numerobis, @Alan Robertshaw
Aww, that is a lovely story.
It reminds me of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Memory_Keeper%27s_Daughter
How that dog got from being on the euthanasia list to getting a new home would also be an amazing story.
“there are no bad dogs, only bad owners” is very largely true; obviously so when the owners are abusive, but 95% of dog training (according to an old friend who used to run a dog training setup) is training the owners.
He used to specialise in rehabilitating “aggressive” dogs, and he was pretty damn good at it (think ‘dog whisperer’ but 100% cockney, and without all the bullshit – everything is all in observation and timing. (Almost everything the TV dog whisperer says is total bs, but what he does is impeccably timed)). He didn’t like people harming their dogs by making them aggressive.
One very macho bloke turned up with a rottweiler he’d called “Tyson” (what a surprise!) saying he’d wanted it to be a protection/guard dog but it had gotten so aggressive no-one could go near it. This friend of ours had a 10-year-old girl walking the dog quietly to heel within the first session; macho bloke was utterly gobsmacked – quite literally, standing there with his mouth open (I know because I was there watching :-)).
They ended up doing maybe half a dozen sessions. Friend told him that part of the turnaround process was changing the dog’s name (we get into certain habits when calling a dog’s name) and told the bloke he had to change its name to Daffodil. It worked (on the bloke, and hence on the dog too).
I’ve always thought fondly of that bloke with his big rottweiler, calling out for Daffodil in the park.
@LindsayIrene
Which is quite funny, given that manospherians seem more likely to never change their socks.
@Lumipuna:
Good point. Night shifts, flex time, and part-time work are also a thing. Not to mention lunch and coffee breaks.
Batting trolls around really isn’t that time-consuming.
When terrible men on the internet claim to have a job, and are willing to say what they do, it seems like 90% of the time they claim to have a job in computer science/IT. It’s like they can’t imagine having a job that doesn’t involve computers in the central function, and they simply must go into a manly-man STEM job. It honestly makes me wonder how computer science and IT are not oversaturated with workers at this point.
Terrible men never seem to claim to be chemists, or civil engineers, or astrophysicists, or other manly-man STEM jobs other than computer science and IT. And they certainly never claim to be grocery store stockers or janitors or burger-flippers, or anything that society doesn’t value with a high salary. Those who hold these types of jobs seem to either keep veeeeeery quiet about it, or else lie and say they are developing video games as a career.
No point with this, just something interesting that I’ve noticed.
A statement with no evidence, par for the course with you. It’s actually quite dead in here during the workday, something I’ve noticed since I started working from home and have the ability to check in from time to time during weekdays. The site moves extremely slowly during times when most people with jobs are working. It picks up a lot in the evening right about the time I’m heading to bed, which is kind of inconvenient for me.
I have to say, this AI seems genuinely benevolent. This overlord I could get behind.
@PoM
The interesting thing is, while most of them that are open about their jobs claim to be in STEM, MRAs love to talk about how many men are mechanics or miners or other blue collar jobs and “male disposability”. Despite this, I’ve never actually heard from an MRA who is a mechanic or a miner or similar, they just love to use those occupations as pawns when useful.