I use AI every single day to reframe client briefs, draft emails, speed through landscape research, or build pitch decks. Failing to utilise artificial intelligence daily in 2026 does not make you a purist; it just makes you slow. At Idiotic Media, we do not debate whether to use AI. We debate how to use it to push cultural boundaries.
Brand managers often ask me whether the rise of AI creators is an existential threat to meme agencies. It depends entirely on whether you think meme marketing is about mass-producing content or capturing a human subculture.
AI helped drop the cost by 90%. The threat is still zero
Three years ago, creating a credible Indian virtual influencer necessitated significant financial resources, specialised 3D studios, and substantial technological investments to achieve a human-like avatar. Today, that barrier has completely collapsed.
The cost of building a passable AI creator has plummeted by nearly 90%. Anyone with a basic open-source model and a laptop can spin up a virtual persona in an afternoon.
But do these synthetic creators pose a true threat to meme agencies? My answer is a definitive no. AI can clone a flawless face, but it cannot clone a real personality or replicate a cultural heartbeat. It remains a fascinating tech novelty rather than a structural threat to authentic creative businesses.
The trust paradox: Why audiences don’t care
What genuinely surprises me about the current landscape is how internet audiences view this content.
Gen Z and Gen Alpha consumers in India are shockingly indifferent to whether a character is real flesh and blood or digital. They do not care if a short-form video is AI-generated, provided it delivers raw entertainment value.
For modern viewers, entertainment completely trumps visual authenticity, meaning if it makes them laugh, they will share it.
This high level of audience acceptance has triggered a massive shift in brand behaviour. CMOs are actively reallocating serious marketing budgets away from traditional, bloated production pipelines and moving them into experimental AI workflows. The willingness to consume synthetic content is there, meaning the brand money naturally follows it.
The banana, the papaya, and why AI lacks a pulse
There is a massive misunderstanding about what AI actually does inside a creative agency. No successful meme page uses pure AI for actual creativity. Instead, the best creators use AI as a high-speed asset generator to build images, manipulate frames, or create absurd visual scenarios.
Consider a viral video trend like a banana marrying a papaya. It is hilarious, surreal, and perfectly mirrors the chaotic nature of modern internet humour. AI is brilliant at generating that exact visual asset at lightning speed.
But the creative mindset, the contextual absurdity, and the narrative direction are being backed by a human. The specific quotes, local dialogues, and emotional comic timing require direct human intervention.
AI will be deeply embedded in every meme in the future, but it only provides raw elements. It can never replace internet culture itself.
The automated spam factory epidemic
The sudden explosion of fully automated, faceless meme pages on Instagram and Threads highlights this reality. Running an entertainment page 100% with automated AI simply will not work long-term.
These pages are digital spam factories that use algorithmic manipulation to farm vanity metrics, copy content from authentic pages, and temporarily inflate view counts.
No matter how much you automate, you cannot copy your way to cultural relevance. Spamming the feed with zero originality might yield a temporary spike, but it builds no longevity.
Look at what is trending of late. People pick random trending videos, keep the audio and video exactly the same, and just change the faces using AI to spam the internet. This lazy, unoriginal loop offers brands zero real equity or true community value.
Buying media space on these automated accounts means throwing budgets into a black hole because copy-paste spam builds no loyal fandom. You can use AI to scale execution, but using it to replace original thought fails completely.
The next two years: Welcome to the hybrid hub
Where is the industry heading over the next twenty-four months? We are moving rapidly toward a hybrid ecosystem where the agencies that thrive will transform into a hybrid hub.
Campaign workflows will be heavily AI-automated in the backend to handle asset creation, localisation, and basic template execution. However, the top layer, which includes the creative hook, the emotional nuance, and the actual community deployment, will remain fiercely human-led.
Internet culture is not a static dataset that you can scrape and automate. It is an evolving, living conversation that happens in real time. You can use AI to build the stage, but you still need a human to write the script and deliver the punchline.
(Sankalp Samant is the Co-Founder of Idiotic Media, an influencer marketing agency known for its creative campaigns and innovative approach.)