It is price clarifying that AI fashions didn’t generate the photographs used within the examine. As an alternative, researchers used in style, 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 fully by AI fashions scored greater 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 subjects. They be aware that this examine is among the many first to point out AI-generated memes outperforming human-created ones throughout these metrics.
Nonetheless, the examine comes with an vital caveat. On common, absolutely AI-generated memes scored greater than these created by people alone or people collaborating with AI. However when researchers checked out the most effective 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 persistently 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 increase, human-AI collaborative memes didn’t fee 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.”
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 examine, the researchers counsel that individuals considering utilizing AI ought to rigorously think about the best way to steadiness AI help in inventive duties.
