I’m in a D&D campaign at the time of writing. In the last session of this campaign, we rescued a hot snake lady. How hot? How snake? How lady? Dunno, but feel free to reckon in your free time. Nevertheless, one of the other players in the campaign decided his character should become obsessed with the hot snake lady. This is funny; don’t get me wrong. Later in the Discord for the campaign, he pasted a poem by his character to this snake lady. This too is funny – until he said he did it with ChatGPT. But why is this? Why does a poem or a meme made by generative AI feel like cheating or worse? And why is this loss of value orthogonal to the quality of the art?

I write code professionally. I write poetry as a hobby. I write jokes to the chagrin of all my friends. Gathering up all the appeal to authority I can muster as an author of this post you are reading, I think I have a decent eye for what is good in these media. Maybe I don’t know what is “great”, but I can spot good. Generative AI writes good stuff. Code that is locally clean, scalable, and sensible. Poetry that has moving meaning and plays with form. Jokes that are at least as funny as the best meme on Facebook yesterday.

So, if it is good, why doesn’t it feel good. Why does it feel like we’ve been fooled or duped when someone says, “Oh yeah, I made that with AI.” “Oh it loses it’s meaning!”, you scream. Fair but why? What meaning is lost from my friend’s poem about a yearning of serpentine fellatio?

Sunday Nobody is a meme artist. You could, of course, argue that that is just an artist, but I digress. The artist preserved a bag of “Flaming Hot Cheetos” entombed it in a 3000lb. sarcophagus and then interred it in a large hole in the ground. You can see Sunday Nobody do this here.

This is awesome. This feels real. It is of course a meme. However, it is just as much art. This stupid and ubiquitous snack that is an assault to the senses and an affront to a home cooked meal is undeniably culture. People love it and hate it. It is iconic. It is loud and in your face. Yet tucked into the boisterous packaging is an innocuous drive to make you buy more. The Frito-Lay company (a division of PepsiCo) wants as much to be undeniably “The Snack Food” as it wants to imperceptibly siphon your pockets. This chip itself is consumerism incarnate.

Now, it will be immortalized with the likes of the Pharaohs.

Paraphrasing John Green, it has become clear as contemporary art and meme culture near that both boil down to running out the bit. We can all think to a friend who has said, “Dude there was a person at the bar and they were so cute and …”. I think we similarly know that they always get asked, “Well, did you talk to them?” The conception of an idea takes work and imagination, yes. But, it it’s realization we are paying with our time to stake value in the idea that we can show others.

A friend of mine and I recently got into cryptic crosswords. This went from solving to making clues pretty quickly, like:

  • (8) “Pure scale with no cross, I can’t do it”.
  • (8) “Sick from taking a snake from sent mail”.

But then I got a little worm in my brain: I could make a whole crossword and make it funny. As a different friend of mine found out recently, it is hard to get AI to be naughty. All the same, I bet I could ask ChatGPT to make me a salacious cryptic crossword. I bet it would be challenging. However, I wouldn’t have been made it.

Now, is this “it only counts if I do it” machismo?. I don’t think so. I think it is a birthday card for a parent made with construction paper and crayon.

When my friend solves the first clue to my crossword and finds a dirty word, he’ll chuckle. On the second dirty word, he’ll laugh. When he finds nothing but nasty and dirty words as answers to my puzzle, he can rest assured that I picked all those words to make him laugh.

So, it used to be that we were better than the computers, because they couldn’t do what we could. Ask Kasparov about that one. I think we might still be better than them right now. But I don’t think relying copium so early in the game will take you to the end. So, let’s not try to be better.

Hallmark makes better cards than I ever did, but they never made my mom cry. ChatGPT has read alot of the same jokes as me and can reproduce their likeness, but never once has it shared a drink with me. It hasn’t laughed so hard with me that we cry.

So, AI memes don’t count because memes are supposed to be small units of culture that move about. Memes and their creators have never met you, but they are just as human. The shared human condition, the commitment to the bit, the use of our short time here to laugh together is what a meme is caching in. AI memes will get good, but they will never count.