It’s 11:48 p.m. on a Tuesday night. You have class at 9:30 a.m. the next morning but decide to ultimately stay up anyway. Scrolling on your phone watching any short-form content site, you laugh and snide at every few videos you decide to watch all the way through.
It’s a ritual at this point to neglect any sort of physical well-being just to enjoy a few minutes (but what ends up turning into an hour) of doomscrolling. No matter how you feel about social media usage, laughing at the endless assortment of absurd content that our generation has created is a genuinely fun activity to engage in.
However, when the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) began to creep into the social media landscape that we know and love, things have only gotten more surreal; whether that is for better or for worse is up for discussion.
As a 20-year-old Gen Z-er, it’s eerie to see this rise in faux humanity posed by AI. And as an artist and creative, I feel incredibly hypocritical.
Make no mistake that I am against Generative AI being mass-produced, or rather produced at all. It’s causing thousands of Americans living next to data centers to go without clean water. With Elon Musk’s Grok generating nude images of women and children without their consent, it seems that AI will only continue to be a problem against all of humanity.
With this in mind, there is a growing trend of young people — Gen Z and Gen Alpha — finding humor in AI, even while knowing how detrimental it is. Scrolling on TikTok, Instagram Reels or other platforms is now loaded with AI content.
Months before writing this, I began to take note of this trend through videos of fruits eating tiny versions of themselves. At first glance, I thought an artist had taken the time to create a weird visual for people to gawk at until I opened the comment section and saw users note that AI was being used.
This experience had me in disillusionment. Not because of the AI use, but because I saw friends of mine who are artists themselves actively engage in this content. Friends of mine, who, before, would actively state that they do not engage in AI-generated content, eventually would due to its unique humor. And how could they not? It is funny.
From my perspective, this is just the beginning of AI becoming more normalized in our society. Yes, people are still actively against the use of AI by companies and people using it under the guise of “art,” but nevertheless, we still laugh. And it’s not because it’s so bad, it’s laughable, but because it is genuinely funny in the surrealist Gen Z sense.
Even more recently, the meme that took hold of social media weeks ago was the AI baby holding in its laugh. It was the perfect placeholder for a Gen Z meme: surreal, imitable and humorous. But it was extremely uncomfortable for me to grasp. I loved it, I found it funny, but I would find myself feeling an extreme hypocritical burden when I would scroll onto the next video.
It’s as if I’m seeing the future in real time. That AI is replacing human-made images (in this case, memes) and branding them as its own. It’s where I am laughing at AI-generated images, even though they pose a real threat to my future and career as a creative.
I, and many others like myself, are laughing at our own demise in human ingenuity.
With the added fact that AI is selling us on humor and we’re inputting our dopamine toward engaging with this content, it becomes disconcerting how AI can easily wedge itself into meme spaces. By it being humorous, we will only normalize it more as time goes on, and soon have it be integrated into everyday life if it isn’t already. If AI can make us laugh and can replicate the weird nature of viral memes, what’s next?
In the case of the AI baby meme, the image of the baby was created by artist Dallas Rayburn under the title, “Droool.” This image was then rotoscoped onto the Chinese media influencer, Xiucai. Rayburn’s artistic image becoming viral yet not being compensated or credited for it is one thing, but for it to be used in AI is another. It remains unclear whether Rayburn gave his consent for his artwork to be used in AI; no one but him knows.
With each passing day, there’s more and more news about the future of Generative AI. OpenAI’s Sora 2, Google’s Nano Banana and other Generative AI models are broadening the scope of what AI most recently was. Now, it’s more realistic than ever before. I can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s robotic anymore. What I see now is an extremely human-looking person, looking back at me, an extremely human-looking person.
Despite this, I can only remain optimistic about what is at stake. Is the AI bubble popping? Maybe. But over the holidays, when I would see my siblings and my family who celebrate art and encourage me to reach for my passions, I would also see Generative AI in the decor of their homes.
Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner were in high spirits, but when I would look down at my plate, I would see noticeable AI designs on the placemats. When I would interact with my sister, she would state how she uses ChatGPT for everything, saying “Chat this,” and “Chat that.” When I would shop with friends, they’d consider buying AI-generated designs on stickers.
The people who have supported me and have supported the arts are seemingly downplaying the situation at hand due to the newfound aesthetically pleasing nature of AI.
With all of this confronting me, I still can’t help but find AI-generated content funny. I can’t help but smile at it and I can’t help but laugh at it. But under the guise of my smile, I also can’t help but fear it taking over my livelihood.
While all of this may sound extremely cynical and disheartening, I still think human ingenuity will persist. Accompanying these AI trends are also artists redrawing them, making them their own. And while I do still agree that there is definite hypocrisy involved with finding an AI-generated meme funny, it’s nice to see human creativity adapt and persevere.
Isabella Leon is scared of IJBOLing at AI memes.
A version of this article appeared on p. 16 of the February 19, 2026 edition of the Daily Nexus.
