Almost every internet lurker is familiar with the image: A man stares at a passing woman with a “How are you?” expression that would put Joey Tribbiani to shame. Since it emerged in 2017, the “distracted boyfriend” meme, which took that stock photo and projected scenarios onto it, has become ingrained in the internet’s collective consciousness. Now, artificial intelligence is making that viral moment, like dozens of other memes, fuzzy.
Often called “time traveler“videos, especially on TikTok, the AI-generated clips currently circulating the internet take familiar memes and add context that wasn’t there before. In some cases, they “interrupt” the action; sometimes they include a haunting specter. In the “distracted boyfriend” animation that was posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) last month shows a boy turning around and following a girl walking in the opposite direction while his girlfriend stands nearby.
The clip was made using Luma Dream MachineAI model that takes source images and text prompts and creates high-quality, realistic videos. Within days of its releasesocial media users began borrowing images and frames from recognizable memes to create visualizations that tested the Dream Machine’s generative abilities. The results proved that while the AI model wasn’t flawless, it had the ability to rewrite internet history by changing the network’s most enduring images.
As the Dream Machine spread, some common visual elements emerged limitations and disadvantages generative AI showed up in the model’s output, such as unnatural depictions of people and changing objects. While some social media users found the visualizations terrifying and disturbing in terms of AI acceleration and its potential to create misinformation, others found amusement in the model’s inconsistent errors.
While it may seem unsettling that one of these AI-modified memes could become so popular that it overshadows the image that inspired it, Know your meme editor Phillip Hamilton doesn’t think the trend poses much of a threat to the survival of digital media. Rather, it’s the ubiquity of originals that makes reboots work.
“Generally, everyone knows the context,” Hamilton says, referring to edited viral images. “The iconicity of the video is at the heart of the trend… the heart of it. [time-traveler] “A meme is a popular thing that gets stopped.”
The nature of meme sharing on social media relies on user interaction with the meme. Since most of it is the result of editing, AI-editing memes is fair game, Hamilton says.
Luma boasts that the Dream Machine can generate 120 frames of high-quality video in under 120 seconds, despite significant delays due to extremely high demand. The swift generation, along with the availability of a “free” tier that lets users generate up to 30 clips per month, has made the Dream Machine much more accessible than its OpenAI counterpart, Sora, which, despite being revealed in February, has yet to be released to the public.