Who needs AI when meme accounts still exist? Nowadays, following accounts that create and share man-made memes might even be a form of protest. Some people estimate that around 71% of images online today have at least some element of artificial intelligence, but memes often persevere — they are the backbone of our collective Internet.

Also, is any intelligence really required for making memes — artificial or human? Memes are usually the work of our last brain cells, all about nonsensical humor, the absurd we experience in our lives, and meta Internet things. Check out these funny posts from “Memers Hut” and let us know just how much brainpower they took in your opinion.

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Can Skynet be funnier than people on the Internet? So far, research has given us mixed results. Studies suggest that large language models like ChatGPT are better at coming up with quippy lines and funny jokes, but AI-generated memes still lag behind human-made ones.

According to a 2024 study, LLMs can generate better jokes and one-liners. The researchers asked the ChatGPT 3.5 model to generate satirical The Onion-style news headlines and compared them to those of a comedy writer. Respondents couldn't tell which were which and rated ChatGPT's headlines as funnier.

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However, when it comes to memes specifically, humans still seem to have the upper hand. In a 2025 study, researchers had three groups generate memes: one group of humans, another one of people using an LLM's assistance, and a third one where memes were generated solely by an LLM.

The researchers found that people found human-created memes the funniest, but the most creative and shareable ones came out of the group of people who worked together with an AI model. "The best results came when humans curated and refined what the AI produced," co-author Zhikun Wu, a master’s candidate at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, explained.

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After the bunnies on the trampoline video fiasco, many people might've sworn to avoid engaging in any sort of funny or entertaining content online that has even a touch of AI — at least as far as they can help it. In our own bubbles, it may seem like people are swearing off AI-generated content entirely and denouncing any type of content that was made using AI, memes included. Yet wider-reaching research shows that the majority of people don't really care.

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In 2025, the researchers at the Penn State Media Effects Research Lab found that users don't really care if a meme has been made by AI, so long as it's funny. They used the "Generated by AI" feature on social media to inform people that specific memes were not human-made, yet it didn't significantly impact their evaluation.

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There was one more interesting finding in the research, though: those who had negative opinions about AI in general were more likely to say they found AI-generated memes less funny. The effect worked in reverse, too: those who thought of AI positively were more likely to share the AI-generated memes and perceive them as funnier.

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People's attitudes toward AI-generated memes aren't always black and white. A study of AI memes in the 2024 U.S. Presidential election found that obvious AI visuals decrease engagement rates. However, if it's a familiar meme format, people are more likely to "like" and share it. The researchers also concluded that the majority (85%) of memes in their dataset were of traditional, non-AI formats.

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It's hard to say what the future holds for memes, but we can't deny that AI-generated content is flooding the internet. Just this August, data from the Pew Research Center showed that one in ten webpages has significant signs that at least some parts of it were made by AI.

That might seem like a low number, but you have to take into account that their dataset included webpages created well before the advent of ChatGPT and other LLMs. About one-third out of the 10,000 webpages they took as a sample were created after ChatGPT became available to the public in 2022.

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Which memes from "Memer's Hut" did you enjoy the most, Pandas? Let us know your favorites in the comments! And if you're craving a different genre of memes, check out our previous publications about edgy memes for people who have a dark sense of humor and funny memes about celebrities for those who speak fluent pop culture.