You're scrolling. It's late. You see a picture of a cat wearing a suit, but the text says something completely nonsensical like "The industrial revolution was a mistake for the beans." It makes no sense. Yet, you laugh. You might even wheeze. This is the strange, glitchy reality of This Meme Does Not Exist, a corner of the internet where artificial intelligence tries—and often hilariously fails—to understand what makes humans chuckle.
It isn't just a website. It's a mirror.
Back in 2019, Dylan Wenzlau, the creator of the popular meme-making site Imgflip, decided to see what would happen if he fed 100 million public meme captions into a machine learning model. He used a deep convolutional neural network. Specifically, he used a system that could look at an image template—like the "Distracted Boyfriend" or "Woman Yelling at a Cat"—and predict what kind of absurd text should go on top of it. The result was This Meme Does Not Exist, an AI generator that produces infinite, unique memes that have never been seen before.
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The Ghost in the Machine Learning
What’s actually happening under the hood? It’s not "thinking." It’s math. The AI doesn't know what a "stonks" is or why a "Doge" should speak in broken English. Instead, it looks at patterns. If it sees a specific pixel layout (the template), it calculates the statistical probability of certain words appearing in certain positions.
The AI was trained on a dataset of approximately 48 popular meme templates. When you click that "refresh" button, you aren't just getting a random word generator. You're getting a prediction of human behavior. But because the AI lacks a "soul" or a sense of timing, it creates a brand of surrealism that humans struggle to replicate on purpose.
Sometimes it hits on something profound. Other times, it creates "The Floor is Lava" memes where the floor is "tax evasion."
Why the Glitch is the Feature
Most AI developers spend their lives trying to remove hallucinations. In the world of This Meme Does Not Exist, the hallucinations are the product. We've spent decades perfecting the art of the "joke," with its setup and punchline. Then comes this neural network that ignores the rules.
It's essentially "Shitposting as a Service."
The appeal lies in the absurdity. Because the AI doesn't understand context, it pairs high-stakes emotional images with mundane or surreal text. You'll see the "Change My Mind" guy sitting behind a sign that says "Milk is just bone juice." It’s funny because it’s almost right, but just wrong enough to trigger a dopamine hit. We call this the "Uncanny Valley of Humor." It's close to human, but the gaps are where the comedy lives.
This Meme Does Not Exist and the Evolution of Modern Wit
If you look at the history of internet culture, we've moved from "Advice Animals" (very structured, very predictable) to "Deep Fried Memes" (chaotic, distorted). This Meme Does Not Exist arrived at the perfect time. It represents the ultimate peak of post-irony.
We’ve reached a point where the fact that a machine made the joke is part of the joke itself.
Honestly, it’s a bit humbling. You realize that a lot of our humor is actually quite formulaic. If a machine can guess that we like jokes about "depression," "pizza," and "the void," then maybe we aren't as unpredictable as we think we are. Dylan Wenzlau noted that the AI often leans into the "edgier" side of the internet because that's what the training data contained. It’s a literal reflection of the Imgflip community’s collective psyche circa 2019.
The Technical "How" Without the Boring Stuff
Technically, it uses a character-level recurrent neural network (RNN). But Wenzlau tweaked it. He didn't just want it to generate text; he wanted it to generate relevant text. He used a "prefix" method where the image ID is fed into the model first.
Think of it like this:
- You pick the "Two Buttons" meme.
- The AI sees code "ID: 12345."
- The AI "remembers" that ID 12345 usually has words like "me" or "my responsibilities."
- It rolls the dice.
- It spits out: "Sleep" vs "Thinking about every embarrassing thing I did in 2012."
But because the "temperature" (a setting in AI that controls randomness) is set relatively high, it often wanders off the path. That’s how you get the truly legendary stuff that goes viral on Twitter or Reddit.
The Ethics of an Automated Laugh
Can a machine be an artist? It’s a question that keeps philosophers up at night. When you use This Meme Does Not Exist, you are participating in a collaborative act. The AI provides the chaos; you provide the curation.
You might click "generate" 50 times before you find one that makes you lose your mind. In that moment, you are the editor. The AI is the writer. It’s a weird partnership.
There are limitations, obviously. The model is frozen in time. It doesn't know about the latest TikTok trends or the current political drama unless it was already a staple of meme culture years ago. It’s a time capsule of "Peak Internet." It also struggles with very complex wordplay. It can’t do a double entendre. It can’t do sarcasm—at least not intentionally. But unintentionally? It’s the king of sarcasm.
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Why We Can't Stop Refreshing
There is something addictive about it. It’s like a slot machine for your funny bone. You keep pulling the lever because you know that eventually, it’s going to produce something so perfectly bizarre that it feels like a personal attack.
A lot of people use these generated images as reaction images in Discord servers. It adds a layer of "I didn't even make this, a robot did, and yet it perfectly describes my current mental state." That’s a powerful social currency.
It's also worth noting how this influenced other tools. We now have DALL-E and Midjourney, which can create the actual images from scratch. But This Meme Does Not Exist remains special because it works within the constraints of established cultural "templates." It plays the game we already know, just with different rules.
How to Get the Most Out of the Generator
If you're looking to actually use this for content or just to kill time, there are a few ways to "prime" the engine.
First, don't settle for the first result. The AI is hit-or-miss. The "hit" rate is probably 1 in 10 for a "sensible" meme and 1 in 50 for a "viral-tier" meme.
Second, pay attention to the short-form templates. The AI performs better when it has less space to fill. Long-winded text often devolves into actual gibberese, whereas a simple "Distracted Boyfriend" setup allows the AI's randomness to shine.
Third, try the "Shorten text" toggle if the UI allows it. Some versions of the tool let you influence the complexity.
The Future of Not Existing
Will we eventually reach a point where all memes are AI-generated? Probably not. Humor requires a "shared truth." A machine can simulate the structure of a truth, but it can't experience the sting of a breakup or the frustration of a slow Wi-Fi connection. It can only parrot the words we used when we felt those things.
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However, This Meme Does Not Exist proved that AI doesn't need to be "smart" to be useful or entertaining. It just needs to be unexpected.
Practical Steps for the Curious
If you want to dive deeper into this weird world, here is how to actually engage with the tech and the culture behind it:
- Visit the Source: Go to the Imgflip "Ai-meme" page. It’s the original home of the project.
- Check the Settings: Look for the "refresh" button, but also try the "custom" text options to see how the AI handles your specific prompts.
- Browse the Top All-Time: Most platforms that host these have a "Best Of" section. This is where you can see the statistical anomalies—the memes so good you’d swear a human wrote them.
- Use them as Writing Prompts: Seriously. Some of the nonsense the AI generates is so surreal it can inspire actual creative writing or art.
- Study the "Temperature": If you are a developer, look into the Imgflip API. They’ve made it relatively accessible for people to build their own versions or bots based on this model.
The internet is becoming increasingly automated. Most of the time, that's annoying (looking at you, dead-eyed LinkedIn "thought leaders"). But in the case of This Meme Does Not Exist, automation has given us a new way to laugh at the absurdity of our own digital lives. It turns out that when you feed a hundred million jokes into a computer, the computer doesn't learn how to be funny—it learns how to be us. And that's the funniest joke of all.