It is price clarifying that AI fashions didn’t generate the pictures used within the research. As an alternative, researchers used common, pre-existing meme templates, and GPT-4o or human members generated captions for them.
Extra memes, not higher memes
When crowdsourced members rated the memes, these created fully by AI fashions scored increased on common in humor, creativity, and shareability. The researchers outlined shareability as a meme’s potential to be broadly circulated, influenced by humor, relatability, and relevance to present cultural matters. They observe that this research is among the many first to point out AI-generated memes outperforming human-created ones throughout these metrics.
Nevertheless, the research comes with an essential caveat. On common, absolutely AI-generated memes scored increased than these created by people alone or people collaborating with AI. However when researchers checked out the very best particular person memes, people created the funniest examples, and human-AI collaborations produced probably the most inventive and shareable memes. In different phrases, AI fashions persistently produced broadly interesting memes, however people—with or with out AI assist—nonetheless made probably the most distinctive particular person examples.

The research additionally discovered that members utilizing AI help generated considerably extra meme concepts and described the method as simpler and requiring much less effort. Regardless of this productiveness enhance, human-AI collaborative memes didn’t fee increased on common than memes people created alone. Because the researchers put it, “The elevated productiveness of human-AI groups doesn’t result in higher outcomes—simply to extra outcomes.”
Individuals who used AI help reported feeling barely much less possession over their creations in comparison with solo creators. Given {that a} sense of possession influenced inventive motivation and satisfaction within the research, the researchers recommend that folks inquisitive about utilizing AI ought to rigorously think about stability AI help in inventive duties.