Do Androids Dream of Electric Memes?
Memes mutate like cultural viruses, copypastas remix text into absurdity—and now, let's accelerate this using LLMs, blending the Navy Seal, Sherlock Holmes, Tintin, Gru, and Terry Pratchett into endless mashups.
Do you know about memes and copypastas? Memes are viral ideas, pieces of culture, that become memes by spreading. Cultural viruses that survive, mutate, and evolve by passing from one person's mind to another's. There's an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to internet memes if you're curious about those.
Copypastas are a specific kind of meme. Blocks of texts copied and pasted into conversations, on forums, reddit, or social media. They can famous monologues from movies or tv shows, such as the Chicanery Copypasta, someone's lengthy rant that somehow became viral like Gru's Height Copypasta, and people usually like to post them, or variants, around as an inside joke. One of the most famous ones is the Navy Seal Copypasta.
I, for one, enjoy memes. What I like even more though, is combining things in ridiculous and unexpected ways. Such as a 21st copypasta and an obscure reference to fictitious fanatics zealots from a 1992 by one of my favourite wistful, humours, playful, satirical, and most irreverent and memorable authors: Sir Terry Pratchett.
But I'm also lazy. Writing is an iterative process, and getting to a satisfying results, although pleasant, takes time. Often a lot of time. But nowadays, we can quickly sketch out such ideas using the shamelessly derivative soulless plagiarism engines endlessly remixing our collective originality we call LLMs (and yes, that specific tirade was indeed just as shamelessly outsourced to exactly such an engine—irony duly noted and appreciated).
