“Women Laughing Alone While Eating Salad” was a minor internet classic. So it’s not meant to be some great, huge, important artistic expression. But it carries just as much weight as a meme.
This work appeared through author Edith Zimmerman’s indefatigably eccentric lady blog, Hairpin. In its original 2011 format, “Woman Laughing Alone with Salad” was simply a collection of stock photos featuring a woman enjoying herself alone while eating a salad.
That was it. But it defined a certain style of Internet humor for her (I think Julia Halperin and I had that in the back of her mind when we did the “Woman Standing Next to Large Art” post). Masu). It washed a kind of latent surrealism to the surface. Without having to say anything, a kind of feminist accusation was immediately born. The repetition of the motif of “a woman holding a salad” spoke volumes…
People loved it. It inspired a play.
Hairpin moved on to infinity in 2018, marking the end of the web’s “weird blog” era. What awaited him was a fate worse than death. An alien worm entered the corpse. And now, the “women who laugh alone at salad” are living again as disembodied versions.
As discovered from be recent wonderful wired In the story “Confessions of an AI Clickbait Kingpin,” Hairpin’s registration was allowed to expire, but was subsequently acquired by Serbian entrepreneur Nebojša Vijinović Vujo. He specializes in finding once-popular websites that have been shut down, acquiring their domains, and reviving them as his farm of AI content, making money from the spam ads and Amazon affiliate links you see everywhere. .
Imagine you’re a budding internet historian, or a millennial kid trying to find out what your parents found so funny in “Salad.” Days in the early 2010s. If you go to KnowYourMeme today and research “Woman Eating Salad and Laughing Alone,” you’ll get a puzzle of sorts. Clicking on the link in the entry to KnowYourMeme’s source will instead take you to a new hairpin and a new post published on January 22, 2024.
This is the same stock photo ribbon as Zimmerman’s original. However, the byline reads “James Nolan” and is accompanied by text that relentlessly explains the AI-generated joke.
Screenshot of the new AI-generated reference “Woman laughing alone with salad.”
Just like when explaining any other joke, this will ruin the joke. In fact, it seems to suggest that they can get to know you if you just let them think about your original post long enough. I didn’t have to post any text at all It’s too much of a labor investment compared to randomly pasting something from ChatGPT.
“It’s dark,” Zimmerman said. wiredwhen asked about the reanimated one. hairpin.
and it is It’s not even the worst crime in media history that exists in the new hairpin. That’s what our recent post, “Ask the Future Residents of Real Tiny Houses,” is about. I clicked on it and thought, “Wait, I’m sure this AI website is different.” Really Interviewing tiny house residents…right? ”
And of course not. This replicates the rough effect of Zimmerman’s 2011 blog post of the same name on the original site (stored on Medium) in order to garner clicks from those still investigating the tiny house lifestyle. I’m just collecting quotes from.
Who is the lovely couple at the top? Definitely not the “real” tiny house couple, Margaret and Zach.
Screenshot of the new hairpin “Talk to future residents of real tiny houses”.
“For more updates on their tiny house adventures, be sure to check out their blog ‘Charleston Tiny House,'” the new hairpin post concludes with a robotic cheerfulness. The Charleston Tiny House blog hasn’t been updated in over 10 years.
Vujo has taken over many other sites, including Frisky. wired The latter was a particularly good find, he said, because it allowed him to run lucrative sex toy ads. The once popular women’s website now features AI articles ranging from ‘Top Blonde Models Found on OnlyFans’ to ‘Why Engaging with Manchester Escorts Will Revolutionize Your Lifestyle’ ‘s bizarre palette, including ‘African Design Trends: What’s Going On’. Hot in 2024” and “Embracing the Legends of the Wild West: Gunslingers, Outlaws, and Timeless Revolvers.”
The ending actually begins with the line, “Hello, Wild West enthusiasts!” in what seems like a winking moment of self-awareness.
Things like this are taking the internet by storm.I just read another article on Deputy About a movie magazine written by AI They unintentionally spread fake celebrity photos all over the web, and end up churning out incompetent robo-gossip articles and outlandish robo-movie reviews.
Screenshot of the story movie magazine.
However, the one that still haunts me is the new “Woman Who Laughs Alone at Salad.”
It feels like the gateway to a new kind of internet hell has opened. This means that anyone who loses control of their web presence after gaining a little bit of attention and a few links to their name will be exposed to AI demons looking to prey on any scraps of love left behind. It seems to be hinting at a future of infection. In my fading memories…
People say that culture is dead forever, but this is more like culture being dead forever.
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