A new study examining meme creation found that AI-generated meme captions on existing famous meme images scored higher on average for humor, creativity, and “shareability” than those made by people. Even so, people still created the most exceptional individual examples.
The research, which will be presented at the 2025 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, reveals a nuanced picture of how AI and humans perform differently in humor creation tasks. Still, the results were surprising enough to have one expert declaring victory for the machines.
“I regret to announce that the meme Turing Test has been passed,” wrote Wharton professor Ethan Mollick on Bluesky after reviewing the study results. Mollick studies AI academically, and he’s referring to a famous test proposed by computing pioneer Alan Turing in 1950 that seeks to determine whether humans can distinguish between AI outputs and human-created content.