Generative Play

While meme culture has long allowed racism, xenophobia, and sexism to be repackaged in the visual vernacular of the web, generative AI models provide a new set of affordances. These models are easy to access and use; “fun” in the sense of generating unexpected or surprising results; and fast, allowing rapid generation and collective sharing. Combined, these features enable a kind of unrestricted, creative, and computational play that gamifies hate, with an ever-open invitation for others to join in: no technical skills necessary. We refer to these emerging social and vernacular creative practices as generative play—a new form of meme-making uniquely afforded by prompt-based generative AI models. This new sociotechnical production process, fueled by AI models, prompts us to reconfigure how we have typically understood and characterized “memetic logics” in relation to the study of internet memes.