It is price clarifying that AI fashions didn’t generate the pictures used within the examine. As a substitute, researchers used well-liked, pre-existing meme templates, and GPT-4o or human contributors generated captions for them.

Extra memes, not higher memes

When crowdsourced contributors rated the memes, these created solely by AI fashions scored greater on common in humor, creativity, and shareability. The researchers outlined shareability as a meme’s potential to be extensively circulated, influenced by humor, relatability, and relevance to present cultural matters. They be aware that this examine is among the many first to point out AI-generated memes outperforming human-created ones throughout these metrics.

Nevertheless, the examine comes with an necessary caveat. On common, totally AI-generated memes scored greater 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 essentially the most inventive and shareable memes. In different phrases, AI fashions constantly produced broadly interesting memes, however people—with or with out AI assist—nonetheless made essentially the most distinctive particular person examples.

The examine additionally discovered that contributors 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 price greater 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.”

Members 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 examine, the researchers recommend that individuals thinking about utilizing AI ought to rigorously think about easy methods to stability AI help in inventive duties.