Shitposting Our Way Through the Singularity

We’re all slowly drowning in a sea of AI-generated bullshit.

Every day, millions of artificially intelligent chatbots and content generators are spewing out an endless stream of blandly competent social media posts, product reviews, and customer service replies. They’re churning out passable blog articles, generating mildly amusing memes, and even writing entire books and screenplays.

As large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 continue to improve, they’ll get even better at mimicking human communication patterns and producing content that’s virtually indistinguishable from what a mediocre (sorry, but it’s fucking true) human writer might create.

What’s a flesh-and-blood creator to do in the face of this rising tide of synthetic content? How can genuine human thinkers, writers, and artists differentiate themselves from the AI hordes?

Simple: by going completely fucking insane.

Okay, not literally insane (although that’s certainly one option). But as AI-generated content becomes increasingly ubiquitous and difficult to distinguish from human-created work, we’re likely to see a resurgence of absurdist humor, surrealist art, and straight-up shitposting as a way for humans to signal their authenticity and creativity.

Think about it: What’s the one thing that even the most advanced AI struggles with? Genuine originality and the kind of context-breaking, expectation-subverting weirdness that defines truly avant-garde art and humor. An AI can easily generate a perfectly serviceable knock-knock joke or a mildly amusing observational quip. But it would struggle mightily to produce something as gloriously unhinged as, say, the surrealist masterpiece “Un Chien Andalou” or a classic bit of Monty Python absurdism.

Throughout history, artists and thinkers have turned to avant-garde, absurdist, or deliberately provocative forms of expression as a way to differentiate themselves from the mainstream and signal their authenticity and originality.

In the early 20th century, the Dadaist movement emerged as a reaction against the rationalism and logic that many artists felt had led to the horrors of World War I. Dadaists embraced nonsense, irrationality, and absurdism as a way to challenge conventional artistic expression and societal norms.

In the 1970s, you had the emergence of punk rock as a deliberately abrasive, stripped-down alternative to the polished studio productions and proggy excesses of mainstream rock. Punk wasn’t a musical genre; it was a fuck-you to the entire music industry establishment. Hardcore punk? A fuck-you to punk itself.

We’re facing a new kind of establishment: the tyranny of algorithms and artificial intelligence. And just as previous generations of artists rebelled against societal and artistic norms, today’s creators are starting to push back against the creeping homogenization of digital culture.

We’re already seeing early signs of this trend. Take, for example, the rise of “weird Twitter” and its spiritual successor, “weird Threads.” These loose collectives of online humorists specialize in surreal, often nonsensical posts that defy easy categorization or understanding. Their humor is characterized by non sequiturs, deliberate misspellings, and a gleeful disregard for conventional joke structures.

Consider this classic weird Twitter post from @dril:

“who the fuck is scraeming ‘LOG OFF’ at my house. show yourself, coward. i will never log off”

Or this gem from the Facebook page

“Welcome to my meme page, you may only enter if you’re gnarly”: “when u walkin”

accompanied by an image of SpongeBob SquarePants’ legs crudely photoshopped onto a picture of mountains.

These posts aren’t random nonsense (although they can be that too). They’re a deliberate rejection of the polished, focus-grouped, SEO-optimized content that dominates most of social media. They’re a middle finger to the idea that online communication should be easily digestible, immediately understandable, or optimized for engagement metrics.

And this kind of humor is incredibly difficult for AI to replicate convincingly. Sure, an LLM could probably generate something that superficially resembles a weird Twitter post. But it would likely lack the ineffable human touch, the sense of gleeful absurdism and meta-commentary on internet culture that defines the best examples of the genre.

We’re seeing similar movements in visual art, music, and literature. Take vaporwave, the internet-born music genre that combines slowed-down samples of 80s pop and muzak with surreal, glitchy visuals. Or consider the rise of “deep fried” memes, where images are deliberately degraded through multiple rounds of compression and filtering until they become almost unrecognizable.

These forms of expression serve as a kind of human watermark. They’re saying, “This is so weird and specific that it could only have come from a human mind.”

As humans lean harder into absurdism and surrealism as a way to differentiate themselves from AI, we might actually end up pushing AI development in new and unexpected directions.

AI researchers and developers don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re constantly trying to make their models more “human-like,” which means training them on the latest trends in human communication and creativity. So as human creators embrace increasingly weird and abstract forms of expression, AI models will inevitably try to catch up.

This could lead to a kind of arms race of absurdism, with humans constantly pushing the boundaries of weirdness and AI scrambling to keep up. And who knows? Maybe this process will actually lead to more creative and interesting AI models. After all, an AI that can genuinely understand and generate absurdist humor would need to have a pretty sophisticated grasp of context, subtext, and the very nature of meaning itself.

For one thing, it matters because creativity and originality are fundamental aspects of human culture and progress. If we reach a point where most of our cultural output is being generated by AI, we risk stagnation. The weird, the absurd, the provocative — these are often the sparks that ignite new movements, new ways of thinking, new forms of art and expression.

This trend speaks to deeper questions about the nature of consciousness, creativity, and what it means to be human. Can an AI truly be creative in the same way a human can? Can it understand irony, absurdism, or meta-humor? Or are these uniquely human traits?

These questions will become increasingly important — and they have real implications for how we structure our societies, our economies, and our understanding of ourselves.

Consider this: if AI can replicate most forms of human communication and creativity, what does that mean for the millions of people employed in creative industries? Will human creativity become a luxury good, with hand-crafted, artisanal weirdness commanding a premium in a world of AI-generated content?

Or will we see a bifurcation of culture, with a mass-market mainstream dominated by AI-generated content existing alongside a thriving underground of human-created weirdness?

These are complex questions without easy answers. But one thing seems clear: as AI gets better at mimicking human communication, the pressure on human creators to be weirder, more original, and more authentically human will only increase.

That meme that makes absolutely no sense, or that tweet that seems like it was written by someone having a stroke while high on bath salts? You might be witnessing the birth of a new avant-garde, a digital Dada for the AI age.

Embracing absurdism is a healthy response to living in a world that often seems increasingly absurd and unpredictable. In a time of climate crisis, political upheaval, and yes, the rise of AI, a little nonsense is precisely what we need.

After all, if we can’t laugh at the absurdity of our situation — if we can’t find joy and creativity in the face of uncertainty — then what’s the point? If we’re going to be replaced by robots, we might as well go out with a bang, leaving behind a legacy of weirdness that will confound AI researchers for generations to come.

Shitpost. Embrace the absurd. Push the boundaries of what’s considered normal or acceptable in online discourse. Not because it’s productive or profitable, but because it’s a fundamentally human thing to do. It’s a way of saying, “I’m here, I’m weird, and no amount of machine learning can replicate my particular brand of insanity.”

That’s what will truly separate us from the machines: not our ability to reason or compute, but our capacity for unbridled, nonsensical creativity. Our willingness to be silly, to be weird, to be gloriously, unapologetically human.

And if the AIs ever do catch up to us in the weirdness department? Well, then we’ll just have to get even weirder. It’s a race I think we’re uniquely qualified to win.

Keep it strange, keep it human, and for the love of all that’s holy, never, ever log off.