A new study suggests artificial intelligence has officially passed the meme Turing Test, with large language models now generating memes rated funnier than those created by the average human.
What Happened: Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, posted on X Monday, declaring, "I regret to announce that the meme Turing Test has been passed."
"LLMs produce funnier memes than the average human, as judged by humans," he said, adding, "Humans working with AI get no boost… The best human memers still beat AI, however."
Mollick referenced a research paper titled "One Does Not Simply Meme Alone: Evaluating Co-Creativity Between LLMs and Humans in the Generation of Humor," authored by Zhikun Wu, Thomas Weber, and Florian Müller.
The study explored how humans and AI collaborate to generate memes, comparing the results of three groups: human-only, human-AI collaboration, and AI-only.
Using meme templates and predefined topics like work, food, and sports, participants generated captions during a timed ideation phase. AI-generated memes, created entirely by GPT-4, were then evaluated against those from the other groups based on humor, creativity, and shareability.
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The results showed that AI-only memes were consistently rated higher than human-only memes in all categories. While human-AI collaborations produced more ideas, the quality didn't improve significantly.
Notably, the best human-created memes still outperformed AI in humor.
Why It's Important: The findings underscore AI’s growing ability to replicate—and even surpass—certain aspects of human creativity, particularly in cultural and humor-driven content like memes.
While AI boosts productivity and reduces creative workload, it doesn't always enhance quality when paired with humans.
Image via Shutterstock
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