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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@MansVoice
If conservatism isn’t based around your right to kill people you don’t like, why is it conservatives that every time rush to defend cops that shoot unarmed black civilians? Why is it conservatives that support loopholes like the gay/trans* panic defense that lets people kill LGBTQIPA+ folx and face no jail time? And while you’re at it, can you answer my original question about how looksmatching works in same gender couples?
[Citation Needed]
Someone who thinks that getting self-reports on the behavior of self-selected participants (who didn’t actually agree to participate in any kind of research) counts as “science” thinks this community is stupid.
That’s one of the greatest compliments that could ever be paid to our collective brilliance.
@BoysVoice:
Ah, a LWism. Got you pegged more precisely, now. And meanwhile, no flounce, no play.
@PoM: Wait, did you say a dinner was “great” and then that it included “Brussels sprouts”?
Which was it? Great, or included Brussels sprouts?
@Surplus
Yes, it was both fantastic and included Brussels sprouts. I actually bought the microwave-in-bag kind, because it’s Mother’s Day and that’s the kind my mother likes best, but I actually prefer to roast them. Buy them fresh, cut in half, rub with dijon mustard and peanut oil and soy sauce, then roast at 400 degrees for 10 min, stir, then lower temp to 350 and continue roasting until tender.
They are SO AMAZING when roasted, but my mother prefers her veggies cooked to hell and back, and we were catering to her today.
Re: Sprouts (Nom! They’re the perfect gravy delivery mechanism)
But I like this depiction of artificial selection (if it works).
And today’s award for “Excellence in Projection” goes to…
@Surplus
Another thing to keep in mind is that the boys in the book were upper-class British schoolboys, and British Public Schools are terrible, terrible places aimed at shaping terrible, terrible people. The lads in the article, OTOH, were civilized human beings from a reasonably functional society. The lesson here is the same as the Stanford Prison Experiment: rich white* people are, in the main, complete monsters.
*to be fair, wealthy members of other privileged groups in other times and places were/are also dreadful people.
@Dalilama
1. The Stanford Prison Experiment was a fake.
2. Being a piece of fiction, Lord of the Flies is not “proof” of anything.
@Surplus
A few weeks ago, I had a dream where the Less Wrong guys and the Scientologists had fused into a single cult. I can’t really remember anything except that the Basilisk was somehow Hubbard reborn.
And being a LW-head definitely explains why BoysWhine does not actually know how to reason and mistakes his own certainty for wisdom.
Are you really trying to claim that fiction writing says nothing about the culture and times that the writer lives in? For someone who thinks we’re so unintelligent compared to himself, you sure seem to not grasp really basic literary analysis.
@weirwood
Well, literary analysis is one of those GIRLY SOCIAL SCIENCES, unlike the MANLY-MAN STEM that Mansvoice is familiar with. If he was to study it, he’d get cooties.
@Allandrel
I’ve been having weird dreams too. Apparently a lot of people are right now.
@WWTH
To be fair, he also doesn’t grasp basic statistics or experimental protocols.
@Allandrel, Naglfar:
Um, yeah. I’ve had like three or four times as many vivid dreams as usual in recent months, and most of them are some variation of the zombie apocalypse concept, except only one involved actual zombies, and in any case half the time I’m one of the “infected” (whatever that means in context of the dream) which might be related to the fact that I was one of the relatively early Covid-19 victims. I got through okay, but it still meant that I had to avoid people more than ever for awhile to make sure I didn’t still infect anyone. More recently they’ve been about repeatedly trying to get home but failing and ending up in strange places, or being repeatedly vag-blocked by idiotic circumstances.
I always have lots of vivid and strange dreams, but yeah, I’d say I have even more of them now.
Never been to a Catholic boarding school then, I take it. Civilised (or functional, for that matter) ain’t exactly the word I’d be using. 😀
Most people default to decent and cooperative. They were a self selected group, smart enough to work in pairs to keep each other motivated, and there were only 6 of them, so really zero room for anyone to slack off.
It’s really not that difficult to explain.
Wow he got super defensive when I said hr wasn’t employed. Yeah someone is either a highschooler to young to have a job or is unemployed
I’m not sure if I’m having more strange dreams now than I did before, but this is definitely the first time in my life that grocery shopping has featured so prominently in them.
MansVoice says:
That’s exactly why academic journals have standards and peer review, you silly tit. To mitigate bias.
I’ve been wondering whether the dreams are because more people are waking up naturally now, instead of from an alarm.
@Amtep
From what I’ve read, it seems that people are having weird dreams because a lot of us are trapped inside which leaves us without many new stimuli for the brain to produce dreams from. Though I could be wrong, I’m not an expert and I may be interpreting the articles wrong.
@Dalillama:
Which doesn’t make sense. Actuaries, of all people, need to have an advanced understanding of math and statistics. They shouldn’t be easily fooled by junk science.
I see we’ve reached the Scott Adams portion of the debate.
O/T, but maybe an idea for a post:
Graham Linehan remains locked on Twitter until he deletes his tweets, which he doesn’t want to back down on, but according to rumors he went to Mumsnet and melted down about how his fellow TERFs were conspiring against him, but that was removed by mods. Some other TERFs then created a new thread about how maybe he isn’t advancing women’s rights by attacking women he doesn’t like, but this was also removed by mods but is still cached.
Screenshots:
https://twitter.com/setoacnna/status/1259767880494743553
@Buttercup
Sign me up for a notification for when the debate starts.
I was a bit bummed when I had to go to bed when MansVoice appeared, but it seems I didn’t miss much, since he was just ignoring questions and being high and mighty.
I’ll say this much: it takes something for a person to say that everyone else is stopping the Important Discussion from happening when they are the one just spitting out statements and only acknowledging the replies they think they have gotchas for.
If MansVoice really cared about having a discussion, he would have gone to the last thread he visited (when his busy schedule allowed it) to see if he’d got any more replies or where the conversation had gone. But no, he came here, made a new set of ridiculous statements, asked questions that had already been answered in the last thread he visited, ignored the replies and complained about the quality of the commentariat. He is such a fun guy, this one.
MansVoice was briefly a little bit entertaining, but now just dodges any questions about his beliefs, which makes him much less so.