It is value clarifying that AI fashions didn’t generate the pictures used within the research. As a substitute, researchers used fashionable, pre-existing meme templates, and GPT-4o or human individuals generated captions for them.
Extra memes, not higher memes
When crowdsourced individuals 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 matters. They word that this research is among the many first to point out AI-generated memes outperforming human-created ones throughout these metrics.
Nevertheless, the research 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 most effective particular person memes, people created the funniest examples, and human-AI collaborations produced essentially the most artistic 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 research additionally discovered that individuals 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 artistic motivation and satisfaction within the research, the researchers recommend that folks excited about utilizing AI ought to fastidiously take into account tips on how to stability AI help in artistic duties.