AI — Green wireframe humanoid figures on a binary code background

AI

2022meme subject / creative tooltrending

Published September 25, 2026

Artificial intelligence is both a subject of internet humor and, since the 2022 launch of ChatGPT, a tool people use to make memes themselves. Generative image and text models flipped AI from a distant sci-fi punchline into a hands-on creative medium, spawning meme formats like Erosion Bird, Alligator Kick and AI Presidents Gaming.

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Overview

AI shows up in memes two ways at once. It is the punchline (rogue robots, hallucinating chatbots, cursed image generators) and it is the paintbrush (Midjourney renders, ChatGPT scripts, ElevenLabs voice clones stitched into shortform video). IBM frames modern AI as a stack of nested ideas, with generative models sitting on top of machine learning and deep learning2, and the meme surge that started in late 2022 rides that specific top layer.

The recognisable formats fall into a few buckets. There are the intentionally broken image generations like Erosion Bird or Alligator Kick, which lean into the uncanny artifacts of early diffusion models3. There are deepfake voice bits like AI Presidents Gaming, where cloned Obama, Biden and Trump voices trash-talk each other on Discord using ElevenLabs3. And there are chatbot screenshots, a format Cleverbot pioneered years earlier when users would post transcripts of its strange non-sequiturs online4.

The joke usually depends on the seams showing. Six fingers, warped text, an over-earnest ChatGPT refusal, a president saying something no president would say. When the output looks too clean it stops being funny; when it looks obviously synthetic it becomes a meme3.

Origin & Background

Platform
OpenAI ChatGPT (public launch) / Twitter, Reddit, TikTok (viral spread)
Date
2022

The idea of thinking machines predates the meme by decades. Alan Turing described what became known as the Turing test in 1950, and the term "artificial intelligence" was coined by John McCarthy in 19563. Cleverbot, launched on the web in 2006 by Rollo Carpenter after he began building the underlying learning system in 1988, was the first AI most internet users actually talked to, and its odd replies fuelled a small screenshot-meme economy in the early 2010s4.

The modern AI meme wave began when OpenAI opened ChatGPT to the public in late November 20223. Within months the release of DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion image generators, plus ElevenLabs voice cloning, gave meme-makers a full toolkit3. By March 2023 the technology was moving fast enough that the Future of Life Institute published an open letter, signed by figures including Yoshua Bengio, Yuval Noah Harari, Jaan Tallinn and Elon Musk, asking labs to pause training of systems more powerful than GPT-4 for six months5.

How It Spread

The meme side of AI exploded across 2023. Free browser access to ChatGPT gave everyone a shareable text generator, and screenshots of it writing cursed poetry, refusing simple prompts or confidently making up facts became a running Twitter format3. Midjourney and DALL-E images with obvious tell-tale artifacts, six-fingered hands, mangled text, uncanny anatomy, filled subreddits, and specific images like Erosion Bird and Alligator Kick got named and catalogued as recurring formats3.

Audio deepfakes were the third pillar. ElevenLabs made voice cloning accessible enough that fan-made clips of "AI Presidents" playing Fortnite or arguing on Discord became a genre of their own, spreading heavily on TikTok and YouTube Shorts3. Alongside the humour was a parallel news cycle: the March 2023 pause letter got major coverage in Wired and elsewhere, with the letter warning that GPT-4-class systems could "automate jobs and spread misinformation"5.

The pause did not happen. Six months later Wired reported that companies had instead accelerated, with Musk himself announcing xAI in July 2023 to compete with OpenAI, Google and Microsoft6. Future of Life head Max Tegmark told the outlet he had never really expected voluntary slowdowns, and that his actual goal was to legitimise public conversation about AI risk6. Through that whole period the memes kept coming, and generative AI stayed a live meme subject rather than fading with the news hype.

Timeline

1950

Alan Turing proposes what becomes known as the Turing test, imagining a future where machine and human intelligence are indistinguishable[3].

1956

John McCarthy coins the term "artificial intelligence" at an academic gathering[3].

2006

Cleverbot launches on the web, becoming the first AI chatbot most internet users interact with; screenshots of its odd replies become an early meme format[4].

2022-11

OpenAI releases ChatGPT to the public via an in-browser interface, kicking off the mainstream generative AI meme era[3].

2023

DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion drive an explosion of AI-image memes including Erosion Bird and Alligator Kick[3].

2023-03

The Future of Life Institute publishes an open letter, signed by Musk, Bengio, Harari and others, calling for a six-month pause on training systems more powerful than GPT-4[5].

2023-07

Elon Musk announces xAI, a new company to compete with OpenAI, months after signing the pause letter[6].

2023-09

Wired follow-up reports the pause never happened and that companies accelerated instead[6].

Frequently Asked Questions