Artificial intelligences are awesome. ChatGPT, for example, is capable of understanding and helping us like no other tool. However, there was something that was relegated to the human realm: internet memes. Besides us, no other being or technology was able to understand them… until the arrival of GPT-4.
This new model of artificial intelligence has a multimodal operation. This means that, in addition to text, we can now enter information in ChatGPT through images, sounds or videos. This content includes memes, as revealed by OpenAI on its official blog. Thus, we now know that, in addition to classifying them as humor, GPT-4 also explain what makes them so funny.
OpenAI took care of feeding GPT-4 with quite interesting memes, ironic and abstract in quality. Among the chosen images we see an iPhone connected to a VGA cable, a man ironing clothes in the back of a taxi and a meme about neural networks. The company asked the AI to explain, panel by panel, why the content was funny.
With the first, GPT-4 did not take long to give an answer. «The humor of the image comes from how absurd it is to connect a huge old VGA connector in a small and modern cargo port of a smartphone“, threw ChatGPT. Regarding the second example, he responded with “The unusual thing about this image is that a man is ironing clothes on an ironing board attached to the roof of a taxi on going”.
For the neural network meme, GPT-4 asserted that the humor was in the “contrast between the complexity and specificity of the statistical learning approach and the the simplicity and generality of the neural network approach«.
GPT-4 revolutionizes the way we communicate with technology
Now that ChatGPT has proven to recognize memes before the average parent, it’s only a matter of time before you can start creating your own. Thus, the next generation of internet humor could arrive directly fueled by artificial intelligence, something that YouTube channels, TikTok accounts and robot manufacturers have been trying to achieve for some time.
But let’s not be simplistic. That GPT-4 is able to recognize memes is more impressive than funny. For nature, are pieces of humor that respond to a context, a specific visual style and the abstract culture of the internet. That an AI like ChatGPT is able to understand and explain them only shows us how advanced this technology is.
It is one thing to understand specific information, capable of being shown to be true or false. Quite another is make sense of data as vague as those that make up memes from Internet. If you want to test the capabilities of GPT-4 without having to pay for ChatGPT Plus, there is a very simple way.