Famous ‘distracted boyfriend’ meme is brought to LIFE using AI – as delighted viewers joke ‘we can finally find out what happened to the couple’
Anyone who has been on the internet for a while will recognize the “distracted boyfriend” meme.
And now AI is bringing this classic piece of internet history to life in a whole new way.
X users (formerly Twitter) have shared their creepy animations of the iconic meme, created using various AI animation tools.
The creators even came up with several alternate endings for the meme so we can imagine what could have happened after that moment.
However, not everyone is happy with the innovation, with some concerned commentators joking that ‘no one asked for this’.
Memes have entered the AI era as X users use generative video tools to turn classic memes into short animations
X user @fofrAI shared the first of the AI-generated memes, which they created using Stability AI’s Stable Video tool.
This model allows users to convert word prompts and still images into short videos of between two and five seconds.
The original meme showed a still image of a friend looking over his shoulder at a passing woman as his girlfriend looked on angrily.
In this extended animation, the boyfriend turns completely away from his partner and appears to start walking behind the woman in red.
On X, commenters shared their surprise at the AI-generated clip.
“Memes are getting an AI upgrade,” one social media user wrote.
‘What a time to be alive!’ added one excited commenter.
Meanwhile, another joked that “after all these years, we can finally find out what happened to the couple.”
On X (formerly Twitter), social media users shared their surprise at the animation calling this an ‘AI upgrade’ for memes
However, it wasn’t long before other X users took it a step further and animated alternate endings for the meme.
In a reply to the original post, X user @burconsult posted a second video with the comment: ‘Never mind…’.
In the newly edited video, the woman in red appears to turn and glare at the staring boyfriend, who quickly looks away.
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In this AI-generated video, the girlfriend appears to pull away from her unfaithful boyfriend with a look of disgust on her face.
In a separate post, @burconsult explained that they used Runway’s generative AI to convert the still images into short animated clips.
On X, many users were impressed by the innovation, and the post led to a flood of animated versions of classic memes.
Some even inserted the original meme into the new animated format to show how people were now moving on from the original still images.
However, not everyone was impressed with the AI’s creations, with some social media users joking that AI had gone too far.
“Okay AI needs to be stopped,” one X user joked, while another added: “Nobody asked for this.”
Meanwhile, one commenter simply wrote: “This is very creepy.”
Not everyone was impressed with AI-generated videos, as many X users joked that this was an example of AI going too far
Several commenters also pointed out some of the creepy and unusual elements created by the AI animation process.
While the videos initially look somewhat realistic from a distance, closer inspection reveals bizarre facial features distorted throughout.
In the original post, X users noted that the woman in red’s face becomes strangely distorted as she gets closer to the virtual camera.
One commenter wrote: ‘The red one turns into some kind of goblin’.
“I love how the woman in red started turning into a creature at the end,” another commenter wrote.
Commenters also pointed out how clothes, facial hair, people and cars seemed to appear and disappear randomly in the video.
In the video of the woman in red turning to face the boyfriend, X users noticed how the woman appears to be growing a cardigan as she turns around.
“The lady on the left’s clothes are just growing,” one commenter wrote.
Some commentators pointed out that the AI animation techniques left some strange and often creepy artifacts in the video
One X user discovered the original set of stock photos where the meme came from and found a tumultuous story of love and betrayal
However, this isn’t the first time the distracted boyfriend meme has been at the center of a Twitter firestorm.
Previously, Twitter user Andrew J Abernathy discovered that the original photo was from a series of stock photos depicting the couple in various relationship scenarios.
Abernathy combined these photos into a hilarious story of love and betrayal that went viral on social media.
In one stock photo, the couple is shown holding a baby together, which Andrew shared with the comment: ‘That man is a good-for-nothing and you knew it! Now look what happened.”
It was later reported that the original photo was taken by a 45-year-old photographer from Barcelona named Antonio Guillem, who had no idea that his stock photos had become a meme.
A Tumbler blog called Meme documentation has traced the stock photo’s original use as a meme to January 30, 2017, when it was posted on a Turkish Prog Rock meme page.