'Hello I Am A Wildlife Photographer and This Is A Picture I Captured Today❤️' is a copypasta paired with obviously AI-generated images used as humorous commentary on the technology. The memes are going viral, particularly on X, partly because of the surprising and sometimes grotesque animal combinations. The meme is also feeding into discussions about AI use and its impacts on the arts and the environment.
Meme basics:
- Meme Creator: @derpatron6000/X
- Meme Type: Exploitable, AI
- First Appearance: January 2025
- Origin Source: X
- Peak Popularity: January 2025
Meme origin
Across social media, wildlife photographers have been working to grow their following. As creators, they create introductory videos, often on Instagram Reels or TikTok, sharing some of their favorite shots.
On January 24, 20245, X user @derpatron6000 posted an AI-generated image of a bird in a picturesque stream surroundings. Instead of a typical bird, however, the bird has the face of a cat. The caption of the photo reads, "Hello I Am A Wildlife Photographer And This Is A Picture I Captured Today ❤️."
The original tweet has over 200,000 likes and 8.7 million views. It comes as a shock to the original poster (OP) who retweeted it himself, writing, "oh wow."
Cultural context
The AI image at the heart of this meme is part of a bigger conversation about AI. In particular, it discusses the tool's relationship with both conservation and photography. On the conservation side of things, experts have lamented the toll that AI takes on the environment.
"The computational power required to train generative AI models that often have billions of parameters... can demand a staggering amount of electricity, which leads to increased carbon dioxide emissions and pressures on the electric grid," MIT News explains of the practice. They note that scaling this to be a tool used by everyday people furthers the damage.
"Beyond electricity demands, a great deal of water is needed to cool the hardware used for training, deploying, and fine-tuning generative AI models, which can strain municipal water supplies and disrupt local ecosystems. The increasing number of generative AI applications has also spurred demand for high-performance computing hardware, adding indirect environmental impacts from its manufacture and transport."
Where photography is concerned, creatives are less concerned with AI threatening their craft.
"For all the transformation AI may bring, I find it unlikely that it will turn human effort, expertise, and experience into quaint anachronisms," contributor Allen Murabayashi writes for Audobon Magazine. "The joy of observing a bird and the effort to trek into the backcountry to capture an exquisite photo remind us of nature’s beauty and necessity. It’s up to humans, not AI, to act accordingly to preserve our world."
Meme spread
People began to jokingly reply, admiring the obviously fake photo and commenting with AI-generated images or poorly put together Photoshops, pretending they were captured on camera.
Some people did criticize replies who made their own images, noting they're contributing to the AI issue the meme seems to comment on.
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