AI, Brainrot & Post-Irony

The AI Revolution Hits Meme Culture

In 2022, the public release of AI image generators like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion sent shockwaves through the creative world. By 2023, these tools had become sophisticated enough to generate convincing images from text descriptions, and meme culture was among the first communities to explore the implications. Suddenly, you did not need Photoshop skills, artistic talent, or even a source image to create a visual meme. You could simply describe what you wanted to see, and the AI would generate it.

The immediate effect was an explosion of a particular kind of content: AI-generated images of absurd, impossible, or surreal scenarios. The Pope in a puffer jacket. World leaders as anime characters. Historical figures in modern settings. Celebrities in ridiculous situations. The images were often technically impressive but carried an uncanny quality -- a slight wrongness in the eyes, the hands, the textures -- that marked them as artificial. This uncanniness became part of the aesthetic. The AI's imperfections were funny in their own right, a new form of unintentional comedy produced by machines that were almost, but not quite, capable of understanding what they were creating.

AI image generation raised immediate and profound questions for meme culture. If memes could be generated by machines at infinite scale, what happened to the human creativity that had always been the heart of the culture? Was an AI-generated meme still a meme in the meaningful sense, or was it something else -- content without intention, humor without a humorist? The debate was not resolved; it was simply overtaken by the sheer volume of AI-generated content flooding every platform.

AI Video and the Uncanny Valley

By 2024, AI video generation had advanced to the point where short, somewhat convincing video clips could be generated from text prompts. Tools like Sora, Runway, and others produced videos that were impressive in their ambition but deeply unsettling in their execution. The results occupied a peculiar aesthetic space -- too realistic to be dismissed as animation, too artificial to be mistaken for real footage. Physics was wrong. Movements were slightly off. Objects morphed and shifted in ways that real objects never would.

The meme community's response to AI video was characteristically creative. Rather than using AI video to create convincing fake content, meme creators embraced the technology's failures. The weird physics, the melting faces, the impossible movements -- these became the content. AI-generated video memes were funny precisely because they were wrong, because the AI's attempts to replicate reality produced something that felt like a fever dream. This was a continuation of a tradition in meme culture stretching back to deep-fried memes: finding humor in the degradation and distortion of content.

Brainrot: A New Vocabulary Is Born

In 2023 and 2024, a new vocabulary emerged from the intersection of TikTok, gaming culture, and Gen Alpha (the generation born after approximately 2010). Terms like "skibidi," "sigma," "rizz," "gyatt," "fanum tax," "Ohio," and "brainrot" itself became ubiquitous in online spaces and increasingly in offline conversation among young people. These terms, while individually traceable to specific origins, collectively represented something genuinely new: a slang system generated almost entirely within internet culture, with no connection to traditional linguistic sources.

"Rizz" (charisma or romantic appeal) gained mainstream recognition when it was selected as Oxford's Word of the Year for 2023. The word was derived from "charisma" and popularized by Twitch streamer Kai Cenat. "Sigma" (an independent, lone-wolf personality type, derived from an ironic reinterpretation of the debunked "alpha/beta/sigma male" hierarchy) became both a genuine identity label and an ironic punchline, depending on who was using it. "Skibidi" (from the YouTube series "Skibidi Toilet," in which toilets with human heads battle against humanoid figures with cameras and speakers for heads) became a generalized exclamation with no fixed meaning, deployed as a kind of nonsense word that signaled membership in a particular generational cohort.

The term "brainrot" itself was perhaps the most revealing. Used to describe the perceived cognitive effects of excessive internet consumption -- and, more specifically, to describe the particular flavor of humor and vocabulary produced by the youngest internet users -- "brainrot" was simultaneously a criticism and a badge of honor. To older internet users, brainrot vocabulary was evidence of a generation whose minds had been warped by algorithmic content. To the users themselves, it was simply their language, no more or less valid than the LOLspeak or 4chan slang of previous generations.

"Fanum Tax" and the Mechanics of Internet Slang

The term "fanum tax," referring to taking a portion of someone's food (derived from the Twitch streamer Fanum's habit of taking bites of his friends' meals), illustrated how internet slang now operated. A specific behavior by a specific creator was abstracted into a general concept, given a name, and spread through TikTok until it entered the vocabulary of millions of people who had never watched Fanum's streams. The word's meaning was clear to anyone under 16 and completely opaque to anyone over 30.

This generational slang divide was not new -- every generation develops its own vocabulary. But the speed at which internet slang emerged, spread, and was replaced was unprecedented. Terms that were cutting-edge in January were outdated by March. "Mewing" (pressing the tongue against the roof of the mouth, supposedly to improve jawline definition) became both a legitimate practice among teenage boys and a meme about masculine insecurity. "Looksmaxxing" (optimizing one's physical appearance, from the "-maxxing" suffix culture) represented a sincere self-improvement movement that was simultaneously parodied as absurd vanity. The rapid turnover made it genuinely difficult for anyone not immersed in the culture to keep up, creating a linguistic generation gap measured in years rather than decades.

Gen Alpha's Unique Humor

Gen Alpha -- the generation born roughly between 2010 and 2025 -- emerged during this era as a distinct force in meme culture with their own comedic sensibilities. Their humor was shaped by growing up with iPads from infancy, by TikTok's algorithm, by YouTube Kids, and by a media landscape that had been thoroughly meme-ified before they were born. They had never known a world without memes, and this total immersion produced something genuinely different from previous generations' humor.

Gen Alpha humor tended to be faster, more fragmented, and more referentially dense than anything that came before. A single meme might contain references to five different meme traditions, three TikTok trends, two video games, and a YouTube series, all compressed into a format that made sense only to people who shared the exact same media diet. The humor was not ironic or post-ironic in the way that millennial and Gen Z humor had been; it was something else entirely -- a kind of associative, collage-based comedy that operated on vibes rather than logic.

The Skibidi Toilet series, created by Georgian animator Alexey Gerasimov on YouTube, became the definitive Gen Alpha cultural artifact. The series -- featuring toilets with human heads engaged in an escalating war against humanoid TV-headed figures -- had accumulated billions of views by 2024. For adults, Skibidi Toilet was incomprehensible. For children, it was the defining entertainment of their age. The gap between these two perspectives was not a matter of taste; it was a matter of cultural literacy. Skibidi Toilet made perfect sense if you had grown up in the specific media environment that produced it, and no sense at all if you had not.

Grimace Shake: The Corporate Meme That Worked

In June 2023, McDonald's released a limited-edition purple milkshake to celebrate the birthday of its mascot character Grimace. TikTok users immediately created a trend in which they filmed themselves drinking the shake and then "dying" (pretending to collapse, passing out, or meeting grisly fates). The videos typically cut from a cheerful sip to a scene of the person lying motionless on the floor, often surrounded by spilled purple shake, set to ominous music.

The Grimace Shake trend was significant for several reasons. It demonstrated TikTok's ability to transform a mundane corporate promotion into a massive cultural moment -- McDonald's had not intended or anticipated the death-themed response, but the meme generated enormous free publicity. It also showcased the dark, absurdist humor that characterized Gen Z and Gen Alpha content: the idea that a fast-food milkshake could be deadly was funny precisely because it was nonsensical and slightly morbid.

The Grimace Shake trend also illustrated the new relationship between brands and meme culture. McDonald's, rather than fighting the meme or expressing concern about the death imagery, quietly enjoyed the free marketing. Brands had learned that attempting to control or suppress memes was counterproductive; the best strategy was to let the internet do its thing and reap the awareness benefits.

TikTok Ban Fears and Platform Anxiety

Beginning in late 2022 and intensifying through 2023 and 2024, political pressure to ban TikTok in the United States grew into a genuine legislative effort. Concerns about Chinese government access to user data, algorithmic manipulation, and national security prompted bipartisan congressional action. In April 2024, President Biden signed a law giving ByteDance a deadline to divest TikTok's U.S. operations or face a ban.

The potential TikTok ban generated enormous anxiety within meme culture. For millions of creators and users, TikTok was not just an app; it was the primary platform for creative expression, community building, and, in many cases, income. The prospect of losing it felt existential. Memes about the ban oscillated between gallows humor ("goodbye to all my memories"), defiance ("they can't stop us"), and practical concern ("where will we go?").

The TikTok ban debate also highlighted the fragility of platform-dependent culture. Meme culture had always been shaped by the platforms on which it existed -- 4chan's anonymity, Reddit's upvote system, Vine's six-second limit. TikTok's algorithm had produced a particular kind of meme culture, and its removal would not simply displace that culture to another platform. It would change it, because the algorithm was inseparable from the content it produced. The relationship between memes and platforms was not container and contents; it was ecosystem and species.

Brat Summer: The Lifecycle of a Vibe

In the summer of 2024, British pop star Charli XCX released her album Brat, and the lime-green album aesthetic, combined with the album's celebration of messy, unapologetic femininity, became one of the defining memes of the year. "Brat summer" became a shorthand for a particular attitude: chaotic, confident, party-oriented, and deliberately imperfect. The album's cover -- a neon green background with blurry, lowercase text -- became a meme template, with users replacing the album title with their own phrases in the same style.

The "brat summer" phenomenon even entered politics when Charli XCX tweeted "kamala IS brat" in reference to Vice President Kamala Harris, generating a wave of brat-themed political memes and media coverage. The incident demonstrated how completely meme culture had merged with mainstream cultural discourse. A pop album aesthetic had become a framework for political commentary, and no one found this strange because the boundaries between entertainment, memes, and politics had long since dissolved.

Brat Summer was a fascinating case study in how quickly a cultural moment could emerge, peak, and be commodified in the TikTok era. The entire lifecycle -- from album release to cultural phenomenon to corporate co-optation to ironic backlash -- played out in roughly three months. By fall 2024, "Brat" was already nostalgia, referenced with a knowing wink rather than sincere enthusiasm.

AI Slop and the Content Flood

By 2024, a new term had entered the meme vocabulary: "AI slop." The phrase described the growing flood of low-quality, AI-generated content that was filling social media platforms -- particularly Facebook, where engagement-farming pages had begun using AI to generate images of, say, a soldier made entirely of shrimp or Jesus Christ built from bread loaves, accompanied by captions like "I bet no one will share this." These images were designed not for humor or creativity but purely for algorithmic engagement, exploiting the tendency of older, less internet-savvy users to interact with visually striking content.

AI slop represented a genuine crisis for meme culture. The ease with which AI could generate content meant that the volume of material on social media was increasing exponentially while the average quality was declining. Genuine human creativity was being drowned in a sea of machine-generated noise. The signal-to-noise ratio that had always been meme culture's challenge was shifting dramatically toward noise.

The AI slop phenomenon also created a new kind of generational divide. For younger, internet-savvy users, AI-generated content was immediately recognizable and often contemptible. For older users who were less familiar with AI capabilities, the content was engaging and shareable -- the AI images looked impressive if you did not know how they were made. The result was a platform-specific cultural divide: Facebook became associated with AI slop and older users, while TikTok and newer platforms remained primarily human-driven. The meme ecosystem was splitting along generational lines in unprecedented ways.

The Generational Meme Literacy Gap

By 2025, the generational divide in meme literacy had become one of the most discussed aspects of internet culture. The divide operated on multiple levels. There was the vocabulary gap: Gen Alpha slang that was impenetrable to anyone over 25. There was the format gap: TikTok-native content that made no sense to people who primarily consumed text and image memes. There was the irony gap: humor so layered in post-ironic, meta-referential meaning that it required deep contextual knowledge to parse. And there was the platform gap: different generations occupied different platforms and consumed entirely different content ecosystems.

This fragmentation was historically novel. In the golden age of image macros, a single meme format could be understood by essentially the entire internet-using population. By 2025, there was no such thing as a universal meme. A meme that was wildly popular among 12-year-olds might be completely unknown to 25-year-olds, and vice versa. Meme culture, which had once been a unifying force -- a shared language for anyone who spent time online -- had become a marker of difference. Your memes revealed your age, your platform, your community, and your level of immersion in internet culture.

Meme Culture Fragments into Niches

The fragmentation of meme culture into niches was perhaps the defining trend of this era. Where earlier eras had been characterized by dominant formats and shared references, the 2023-2025 period was characterized by diversity and specialization. There were niches for every conceivable interest: anime memes, sports memes, academic memes, political memes (from every political perspective), profession-specific memes, identity-based memes, and meta-memes about the fragmentation of meme culture itself.

This fragmentation was driven by algorithms. TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube all used recommendation systems that showed users more of what they already engaged with, creating personalized content bubbles. If you laughed at cat memes, you saw more cat memes. If you engaged with political content, you saw more political content. The result was that different users of the same platform could have completely different experiences of internet culture, seeing entirely different memes, trends, and references.

The fragmentation had both positive and negative consequences. On the positive side, niche meme communities could develop highly specialized humor that rewarded deep knowledge and creative expertise. The best niche memes were brilliant precisely because they were inaccessible to outsiders -- the humor depended on a depth of knowledge that only enthusiasts possessed. On the negative side, the fragmentation meant that memes were less effective as a shared cultural language. The common ground that meme culture had once provided was eroding, replaced by a collection of islands connected by algorithm rather than community.

The Authenticity Question

As AI-generated content became increasingly common and platform algorithms became increasingly opaque, the question of authenticity became central to meme culture. Was this meme made by a human or a machine? Was this trend organic or manufactured? Was this viral moment genuine or astroturfed? The questions were not always answerable, and the inability to answer them created a pervasive atmosphere of uncertainty.

This uncertainty was not merely aesthetic; it was existential. Meme culture had always derived its energy from human creativity -- from the wit, the timing, the shared experience of real people making jokes for other real people. If machines could generate memes that were indistinguishable from human-made memes, what happened to that creative energy? Was the humor still human if the human was using AI as a tool? Was there a meaningful difference between a meme generated entirely by AI and a meme generated by a human using AI assistance?

Different communities answered these questions differently. Some embraced AI tools as an expansion of creative capability, no different from Photoshop or meme generators. Others rejected AI-generated content entirely, insisting that authentic memes required human authorship. Most occupied an uneasy middle ground, using AI tools when convenient but maintaining a vague discomfort about what was being lost.

Where Meme Culture Stands

As of 2025, meme culture is simultaneously more pervasive and more fragmented than it has ever been. Memes are the default mode of online communication for billions of people. They shape political discourse, influence consumer behavior, define generational identity, and serve as the primary medium through which collective emotions are processed and expressed. The meme is no longer a subcultural phenomenon; it is culture, full stop.

But the culture itself is in a state of rapid transformation. AI is changing how memes are created. Algorithms are changing how they spread. Generational divides are changing who understands them. Platform instability is changing where they live. The era of the universal meme -- the image or video that everyone sees and everyone understands -- may be ending, replaced by an era of niche communities, personalized feeds, and generational dialects.

What remains constant is the fundamental human impulse that drives meme culture: the desire to be funny, to be understood, to participate in something larger than yourself, to process the bewildering experience of being alive through shared humor. That impulse predates the internet. It predates Dawkins' coining of the word "meme." It is as old as language, as old as community, as old as the first human who made another human laugh. The tools change. The platforms change. The formats change. The impulse endures.

The history of internet memes is not finished. It may never be finished. But every chapter, from ASCII emoticons to AI-generated brainrot, tells the same story: humans are pattern-making, joke-telling, culture-sharing creatures, and we will use whatever tools we have to do what we have always done -- connect with each other through the shared experience of finding something funny. The story of memes is not over. It is, in every meaningful sense, just beginning.