2023-10-10 16:11:21
Instagrammers contemplate themselves in their American Yearbook version, and tweeters have fun putting their bios in pictures. Ready-to-use generative AI tools enable the creation of new games and ways of existing online.
On The idea is then to share the result, whether it is successful or not. The images generally veer into cliché. For my bio, for example, which includes “tech journalist”, I systematically obtain the image of a young dark-haired man with glasses. On Instagram, others prefer to imagine themselves as American high school students from the 1990s, by generating “Year Book” style photos of themselves, all displaying the same somewhat blank look. On TikTok, we have fun transforming our portrait like Studio Ghibli, or Barbie, always thanks to artificial intelligence.
Personalized avatars of boomers, even cooler
“The fascination with self-generated content in relation to oneself is not so new,” notes Laura Goudet, lecturer in English linguistics at the University of Rouen and specialist in discourse analysis in digital culture. We already noticed this a few years ago with the creation of animated avatars on iPhone, which fascinated everyone when they were released. Today, reacting to a publication with a personalized avatar is associated with an “old” practice. I see these AI-generated self-images as their cooler counterpart. I also see it as a way to talk regarding yourself inexpensively. »
Self-presentation on social networks is now enhanced by generative artificial intelligence. This technology, popularized by ChatGPT, Dall.E, Runway and Midjourney, allows you to obtain an image, video or text from a short description.
All our online modes of expression are affected. A few days ago, Meta announced a feature on WhatsApp and Messenger allowing you to create stickers from text. The first testers of the function had fun generating somewhat daring images: a large-chested Karl Marx, a Justin Trudeau with his butt exposed, a Luigi brandishing a gun…
found out that facebook messenger has ai generated stickers now and I don’t think anyone involved has thought anything through pic.twitter.com/co987cRhyu
— defend trans rights????️⚧️ – podesbiens.bsky.social (@Pioldes) October 3, 2023
On Hugging Face, a platform offering thousands of freely accessible models, you can find all kinds of tools allowing you to create images that meet precise instructions in just a few seconds. For example, one of them allows you to get a fake IKEA notice for just regarding anything. Hot Shot, one of the popular tools on the platform currently, generates GIFs on demand. For a short description, you can obtain an animated image translating exactly what you want to express. Some user creations are visible on the home page: Steve Jobs blowing his nose, Elon Musk in the shower, or a cat eating a burrito…
One more ritual
Since the launch of easy-to-access models like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion in 2022, creating an AI image is simple. The appearance of instructions, in the form of games on social networks, and more “limited” tools (that is to say programmed to create a particular type of image: GIFs, portraits, etc.) popularize this technology, above all giving it a social function.
Will these mass-produced artificial images have the same evocative power as classic memes and GIFs, such as Travolta looking lost, Bernie Sanders in mittens, or actor Kayode Ewumi tapping his finger on the head? Some images created by AI have already become part of web pop culture. The video Harry Potter by Balenciagashowing the characters from the saga dressed for the fashion week with techno music in the background, was viewed more than 11 million times, before being copied and diverted. The same goes for an AI video showing Will Smith enjoying spaghetti, recorded a few days following its broadcast by the site Know Your Meme, a reference in digital culture.
The tool becomes the meme
Without claiming to achieve the virality of a meme, these new artifacts allow people to express themselves and communicate online in a new way. Creating an image on a given theme is a new web ritual, adding to an already long list, precisely defined by a study published in 2022. Researchers Tommaso Trillò, Blake Hallinan and Limor Shifman list all these online actions that allow us to display certain values: performing a TikTok dance challenge to demonstrate one’s excellence or creativity, making fun of a “Karen” to show one’s conformity online, posting videos before/following one’s physical transformation (or the renovation of your house) to display your control… We might add: create your GIF or your Yearbook photo to display your creativity.
For Laura Goudet, it is the practice of these tools that becomes “memetic”, more than the image itself. An evolution compared to previous generations of memes, where the creation tools were first reserved for connoisseurs, with technical skills, before becoming popular via image banks from which Internet users came to draw.
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