I never saw any news reports of Haitian migrants allegedly eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. At least, not for the first couple of days after the “news” hit the social media headlines. 

I did see, however, an AI-generated video of a kitten cradled in the arms of Donald Trump with a caption along the lines of “save the cats!” The Haitians chased him with weaponry in the background. I saw another AI video of a cat at a construction site just working to feed the family, praying that he’d live to see another day without the Haitians trying to nab his skin as a rug.  

The event was a meme before it was a story. It wasn’t until after I’d witnessed a flood of meme-ified AI content about the whole debacle that I decided to, you know, wonder if pets were actually getting snatched up from their pens and cribs.

Political Cartoons and the New Irony Machine

Political cartoons have long made up an integral part of American journalism. Papers across the country have featured comedic relief within their pages, with the exaggerated characters, captions, and thought bubbles oftentimes showcasing the truths that often go obscured by euphemisms. Orwell wrote that political language was designed to “give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Cartoons expose the windbags. 

These days, however, political cartoonists have a competitor in town, and there’s no art major or cultural wit necessary — all because AI image generators are here to monopolize the irony game, and anybody with a keyboard and a screen can punch out their scenario of choice. Now, we have an online ecology so inundated with irony, satire, and mockery that the main aim of journalism (telling the truth) is the least of our concerns. 

Our cartoonists and their occasional doses of necessary irony don’t stand a chance.

Everything is a Meme Now

These AI videos are obvious extensions of the meme. They subvert, mock, and coat the world with the absurd. Memes, of course, are often hilarious, and for my generation, Gen Z, meme-ish is our heart language. 

We banter and dialogue and debate in memes, vibes, eyerolls, and languid stares. The meme world and its AI correlate can be hilarious, but the worldview underpinning these ironic expressions is a hopeless one. Truth, under the banner of irony, no longer matters. Truth is for the suckers who still sit down and read the reports. 

AI image-generators reflect contemporary American politics and culture. AI, like politics, is manipulation. It’s in the name — artificial intelligence. But maybe fakery is what we want, and so fakery is what we get.

Both the nihilism and tribalism of contemporary American culture makes AI the perfect propaganda tool. If we’re honest, so much of what passes as “news” is that already: manipulated half-truths, contorted images of the original.

Don’t Be Too Ironic

The author David Foster Wallace once warned his own generation against the excesses of irony. The backlash against tradition, the Boomer generation, and the staleness of entertainment culture had the literati of the day subverting everything to death. If you could be edgy, if you could supplant the old meta-narratives of the West, you were listened to. 

That is, of course, until irony itself became stale, and subversion became convention. 

“A lot of the problem now is that a lot of the schticks of postmodernism (irony, cynicism, irreverence) are now part of whatever it is that’s enervating in the culture,” Wallace said in a 1997 interview with Charlie Rose. For Wallace, postmodernism had already “run its course.” 

The problem with AI-generated videos of Trump protecting cats from Haitians, or Trump and Harris embracing on a beach, is not just that they look real and might be taken as fact. It’s that they show an effort to desacralize the world through irony, to hold no truths as self-evident, and to escape the bothersome burden of living in the real world. Today, every American joe can be a fashioner of the ironic. The question is: Will we care about the rest of the newspaper?