Oksana Dorofeeva and Dominic Lammar - Laughing at or with hype? An analysis of AI hype memes [Hype Studies Conference 2025 presentation]

AI hype is at its peak – and so are critical scholarly efforts to make sense of it. While research in Science and Technology Studies (STS) has illuminated how hyped expectations circulate in media and policy discourses, the role of digital cultures has received comparatively little attention. This paper examines how AI hype is enacted, negotiated, or contested in memes, offering insight into how hype travels and mutates in everyday digital contexts.

Meme studies have demonstrated that these cultural artifacts play a role in complex societal dynamics, from forging queer solidarity to mainstreaming far right ideologies. Memes are compelling, shareable, adaptable framing devices that easily travel between contexts and generate emotions. These qualities give memes strong promotional qualities that brands have attempted to utilise for viral marketing, showing memes’ potential to produce hype. At the same time, memes can parody hyperbolic expectations. Thus, we consider them a compelling lens through which to study the dynamics of AI hype.

Bringing together STS scholarship on expectations, with meme studies, and sociology of humour, this paper conducts a multimodal discursive analysis of a corpus of memes portraying expectations of AI. The aim is to explore how memes reify or critically deconstruct hyperbolic expectations towards AI. In doing so, the analysis identifies a range of positions about AI hype: from ‘criti-hype’ – a critique of hype that simultaneously feeds on and sustains the hype – to a more thorough deconstruction of its underlying assumptions, and the ambiguous, shifting space in between.

Situated at the intersection of digital culture and critical hype studies, this contribution raises new questions about the dynamics of AI hype. How is AI hype reflected in online cultures? Can memetic framings provide a critical resistance towards hype by subverting the assumptions behind it, or do they reproduce its narrative excesses under the guise of humour?