Stanford researchers harnessed AI to generate memes

Artificial intelligence can do just about anything these days, like produce 3D renderings of an object from snapshots, defeat facial recognition systems, or track wildlife in the Serengeti. In a white paper titled "Dank Learning" (yes, really), Abel L. Peirson and E. Meltem Tolunay, the two lead scientists on the project, describe a neural network that ingests, gains an understanding of, and spits out internet in-jokes. The AI consists of a convolutional neural network (CNN) that takes images as inputs and translates them into mathematical representations called vector embeddings (an encoder), and a long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) that creates captions (a decoder). Here's a tricky question: Can you tell which of the following memes were created by the neural net? The Stanford researchers fed the system more than 400,000 images with 2,600 unique image label-pairs from memegenerator.com -- specifically "advice animal"-style memes, pictures with humorously captioned specific characters (for example, a cat in a bathrobe) -- using a Python script.