Print: AI-Generated Images are the Future. Has Nicki Minaj Changed the Game?
Online: AI-Generated Content is Here to Stay
George Boulukos
Journalistic Inquiry
December 18, 2023
Everything’s hot pink in Nicki Minaj’s world; Gag City has taken over social media in the last two weeks, a fictional pink metropolis inspired by Pink Friday 2, Nicki’s new album. The viral sensation is an AI-generated meme recognizable by its remixing of cityscapes to be as pink as possible. The trend is no doubt visually inspired by the digital art surrounding Nicki on her new album cover, and she appears in an empty, shiny pink subway car with pink skyscrapers framing the background. Users got the name of Nicki’s new world from a post on X in which the rapper used the term, “As we begin to prepare for landing, please make sure your tray tables are put back up & your seat belts are tightly fastened. The captain has activated the ‘no bathroom’ sign. If you look out the window, you’ll begin to see the beauty…clear waters, pink dolphins…#GagCity #PF2.” The posts are recognizable by their unique shade of hot pink mixed with the campy, almost Jetsons-like futuristic metropolis.
This trend of AI-generated memes is not new, It garnered attention earlier this year with generated images of Donald Trump getting arrested and getting his mug shot taken. The wave has continued with Harry Potter characters in a Balenciaga campaign getting billions of views on multiple social media platforms. AI-generated content on social media has exploded since Midjourney 5, released on March 30th of this year, the fifth version of AI image-making software that could nearly instantly render images worlds more realistic than its predecessor. Now, numerous AI image-making tools that rival Midjourney are available, allowing everyone with access to the internet to use this revolutionary tool.
The creator or prompter of the Harry Potter in Balenciaga images goes by the username demonflyingfox, he managed to leverage the viral images he created into a revenue stream. He created a Patreon so that fans of his work could pay to see the prompts that created these images. Over Instagram DM, he told me about his journey with AI-generated content, “It just blew up like crazy all of a sudden there were articles online about the Harry Potter series. I knew I had to act quickly to try to monetize this thing I’m doing cause I had thousands of dms asking me how I did it.” Demonflyingfox, represents a new online economy; the prompts behind AI-generated content are being sold according to these posts’ success on social media platforms.
He also told me about why he thinks he’s had success in the field, “My content is successful cause it relies on remixing movies and television shows. People love seeing their favorite movie in a different aesthetic context.” He is not the only one capitalizing on celebrity and AI-generated memes; many social media users I talked to said that this was the first type of AI-generated content they saw on social media. One user said, “Wendy Williams running in the forest from an alien,” another said, “Timothee Chalamet Pregnant. It has been a source of fascination on the internet for years. These ‘deep fakes’ have been popular and widely circulated since the early days of TikTok, the most popular being a Tom Cruise impersonator. Prior to that, comedian and director Jordan Peele and Buzzfeed used deep fake technology with Obama’s face to make a warning about the future of fake news.
Since Jordan Peele made that warning in 2018, deep fake software has only gotten better, and AI-generated images have, too. Social media users have an avalanche of content putting familiar faces in unfamiliar situations. Initially, the internet saw AI-generated content and deep fakes of celebrities primarily used to show off the abilities of the software, think Tom Cruise deep fakes and Harry Potter in Berlin but now many social media users I talked to are more familiar with content like the viral sensation of different celebrities running from monsters in the woods.
Fast-forward to Gag City, where social media users are creating thousands of AI-generated memes honoring Nicki and celebrating her new album. When I asked social media users about Gag City, one user’s demeanor for AI changed, “I think its beautiful. I love the world that was created for Nicki.” The first Gag City-related meme that he saw was of the Spotify building in Gag City, but had no idea what he was looking at. “So I knew that Nicki was releasing Pink Friday 2. I didn’t know when, I don’t know I was busy. Pink Friday 2 was on my back burner, essentially. Then I see on my feed this gorgeous bubble gum pink building with the Spotify logo on it. I thought at first it was a video game collab or something. It ended up being how I knew that Nicki Minaj had a new album coming out”. This meme, not created, distributed or even encouraged by Nicki Minaj, helped her album gain traction on the internet, with users figuring out more about Pink Friday 2 because of the colossal virality of Gag City.
Gag City is a turning point in AI-generated social media content because it represents how the software can be used as a collective posting and promotional tool that ended up costing nothing for Nicki Minaj and Young Money Records. This represents how AI-generated social media or ai memes are shifting to become a viral trend, like a dance would, and can be used as more than just something to cause a brief laugh.
Nicki Minaj unintentionally created a new possible revenue stream and marketing platform for the Entertainment industry. AI-generated content has primarily gone viral from instances of the software showing its abilities or just to simply be a meme, but Gag City an interactive promotional tool for Pink Friday 2. Looking forward, we are going to see companies, brands, and recording artists asking social media users to imagine putting themselves in these worlds. AI image-making software excels at recreating aesthetics that already exist, some artists even deciding to sue. With that in mind, we can imagine how our digital world will soon be flooded with all of our own interpretations of aesthetic movements, practices, and even artists own works.
