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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@Alan Robertshaw
Ha! I had a co-worker do something like that – she was an hour late to a webinar for reasons I can’t remember right now, but probably boiled down to “she didn’t add the appointment to her calendar like she was supposed to.” It was a great webinar, on a product we were using, and I raved about it to our director … only to learn later than our director had decided no one else would attend because my co-worker (y’know, the one who was late) had given it a bad review. What really galled me about that decision was that my co-worker had IMed me during the course saying that she was going to be multitasking during the webinar because she was behind on things.
@PoM, WWTH
You’re right, I may have misread that. I thought the original statement was supposed to be comparing men vs women. Sorry about that.
@ Vicky P
I must confess this lockdown is working out very well for me. I love long walks, so normally I do all my phone calls whilst out. But now it’s all remote working. So I’ve stuck the Zoom app on my phone and I can do meetings, hearings, and webinars whilst out and about. A few people have asked why I appear to have cows mooing in my office.
@ Alan
Ha!
I confess, I’ve been amused as I watch the rest of the working world try telecommuting, since I’ve been working remotely for about 20 years. Everybody’s suddenly discovering stuff my teammates and I had developed processes for about 10-15 years ago (at least).
@ Vicky P
I must remember when real court hearings start again that you have to wear pants for those.
A Brazilian judge did actually go “Full Monty”.
(The legal press is full of stories of people not realising their cameras are on; or even caring)
https://www.westonbar.org/so/61N5VoOJe?fbclid=IwAR3gBGUaUfpC8qs0612nMrw-lSDgZkDFiOiCcKGXBjd3SDS8PisCrslHN6c#/main
I recently learned that teleworking while only dressed from the waist up is called “Donald Ducking.”
@ Allandrel
Same here! And also sometimes “Winnie-the-Poohing”
Well, it sure suggests that a lot of men are really pissed off that women are no longer in a position where they’re forced to marry to survive and as a result we can have standards and choose to be single rather than settle for someone who doesn’t meet them.
Completely mindkilled. Do you really have no idea how ridiculous – how much of a non-sequitur – this comment is?
Weirwoodtreehugger, I think you’ve adequately demonstrated that you’re not a serious person, so you won’t be getting responses from here on out.
Look, the troll is back. And not acknowledging me in favor of insulting WWTH.
For me, the main obstacle to telework is that my dog occasionally decides to jump on me while I’m on calls, so I’ve had to find some new distractions for her to keep her from jumping.
@MansVoice
Before I get declared an unserious person, will you answer my question about how looksmatching works in same gender relationships?
I’m actually pretty done with working from home. I enjoy being able to relax in my home and not have to be “on” or in business mode when I’m on the computer. It makes me actively angry to see Outlook loaded in a tab on my personal computer. I like the commute but am not otherwise happy with this situation. I actually miss my coworkers. I hope it becomes safe to work from work soon, because working from home is not healthy for me.
Crap. I posted too soon and it’s not showing up to edit.
Anyway,
I think it’s hilarious that the poor chap thinks I’m trying to get him to take me seriously. I’m just here to make fun of him and I don’t need responses from him to me to do that. I just need him to keep posting.
Can anyone tell me the cultural origin of this term “mindkilled”? Is it a redpill thing or a blackpill thing, or is it something our troll made up? I’m not familiar with the term and DuckDuckGo has only provided a semi-relevant-sounding link to medium that I don’t want to click. Don’t do research or anything, just let me know if you happen to know off the top of your head.
@PoM
It’s a popular phrase on LessWrong, an Internet forum known for weird pseudoscientific stuff like Roko’s Basilisk. His use of the term shows that he is likely a poster there and shares in their ridiculous beliefs.
If you dare venture into their ecosystem, here’s a link.
I don’t actually know, but I would hardly be surprised if it originated from the “Fear is the mind killer” Bene Gesserit chant in Dune, but if so, it memetically changed into something with a somewhat different connotation.
Edit: Ninja’d by Naglfar. It appears that I was probably sort of right, though I wasn’t expecting it to come from LessWrong (not that I have a high opinion of them).
@Naglfar
Interesting!
Suddenly I can see exactly why our troll is ignoring how I demonstrated his stupid, stupid, stupid article to be stupid. He’s refining the art of human rationality by pretending inconvenient facts don’t exist. Thank you! It’s all clear to me now.
@Naglfar
Color me not at all surprised that there is overlap between LWers and Manosphere creeps.
I remember reading Ken MacLeod’s novel The Cassini Division a decade or so ago, and being shocked by one of the side characters – a nerdy computer type whose only scene involves him raving to the protagonist about how some day, he’ll be a posthuman god and she’ll be his slave. I was like, “WTF? I’ve never seen nerds behave like that, and I am a nerd.”
Little did I know. 🙁
@Snowberry
I don’t know if it’s related to the chant, but it could be. Because I’m a metal fan I’m reminded of the Fear Factory remix EP, which is named after the Dune quote.
@PoM
Yup, that’s the kind of quality material that LW is known for.
@Alan Robertshaw
This might be because the very stupid and very powerful are too often one and the same.
@Masse_Mysteria:
What do you mean, “if”?
Eh, there’s a distinction though. Powerful people are often out of touch, which makes them stupid in some respects, and when masses of stupid people get together to force people to stop defying their uninformed ideas of reality, they can be quite powerful.
Either way, it doesn’t result in them completely getting their way, because usually that would lead to a total breakdown of everything. Rather, even when successful, it results in other people going their way to provide an illusion that they were successful, or cleaning up the damage, or occasionally dumping the damage unfairly on “undesirables”.
Speaking of powerful and stupid, Trump got real arse achey at today’s press conference. Well worth watching the clip.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2020/may/11/coronavirus-us-donald-trump-pence-fauci-isolation-cuomo-latest-news-updates
*reads Alan’s article*
Am I the only one wondering if there would be several Facebook groups calling for the public lynching of the Michigan Governor if that state was led by a man instead of a woman? Or that the Michigan lawmakers wouldn’t be dragging their feet on whether to ban guns at the Capitol Building if it was their lives being directly threatened by armed militias instead of ‘just’ the Governor’s life?
Or no?
These idiots are always just mad they cant force a woman to ve with them, have their children or have sex with them. Boyvoice is just the same way. And for someone that supposedly has such an amazing life. He sure wants to waist it by coming to a site that will drag his dumbass through the streets.