GLIF Social Media Memes

Wojak Meme Generator from Glif will build you a funny meme from a short phrase or single word prompt. Note that it is built to be derogatory, cruel for sport, and may hallucinate up falsehoods. (see tweet announcement)

I am fascinated by this from the angle of modern anthropology. The AI has learned all of this by studying what we write online. Someone can build an AI to make jokes and call out hypocrisy.

Here are GLIFs of the different social media user stereotypes as of 2024. Most of our current readers probably don’t need any captions to these memes, but I’ll provide a bit of sincere explanation to help everyone understand the jokes.

Twitter user: Person who posts short messages and follows others on the microblogging platform.

Facebook user: Individual with a profile on the social network for connecting with friends and sharing content.

Bluesky user: Early adopter of a decentralized social media platform focused on user control.

Mastodon user: Member of a federated, open-source social network with emphasis on privacy.

Instagram user: Person who shares photos and videos on the visual-centric social media app.

TikTok user: Creator or viewer of short-form video content on the popular mobile app.

Pinterest user: Individual who collects and organizes visual content into themed boards.

LinkedIn user: Professional networking on a platform for career development and business connections.

Reddit user: Participant in online communities discussing various topics and sharing content.

WeChat user: Person using the Chinese multi-purpose messaging and social media app.

Discord user: Member of topic-based chat communities, often centered around gaming.

That’s a lot of wit and devastating insults. Glif can generate these by the thousands. Is this just more ephemeral junk that no one will even be able to find in 20 years, or will these cultures be preserved somehow?

Lovers of internet culture were shocked to learn that a fairly major website associated with MTV went dark. “MTV News Website Goes Dark, Archives Pulled Offline” (Mollick tweet)

I see a path to preserving the internet, in a way. There is a collective action problem here. I personally will not contribute money to saving the MTV website even though I think there is some value in having it preserved. A well-capitalized AI company might actually have the resources and an incentive to preserve almost all digital information because everything is potential training data. An obscure Reddit thread might contain a brilliant answer to a question that might come from a paying user for something like Claude. Why waste it, if the cost of storing it is fairly low?
However, that vision of the future is not the same as having the web archive operate like some public library that I can access for free anytime. Right now we mostly rely on the content creators to also pay the cost of hosting a public website.

Related: fascinating thread about China in 2024 “the internet without the web” (HT: Tyler)

Lastly, you’ll notice that the Wojack Meme Generator get attention by being nasty and preying on insecurities… perhaps another iteration of “leading with what bleeds.”

This post was originally published on this site