When I tell people that Americans will soon make money creating memes, they think I’m joking. But remember when nobody believed “YouTuber” would be a real job? Today, YouTubers make millions. Tomorrow, meme creators will too.
What most people don’t understand is that we are sitting on the greatest economic transformation since the industrial revolution. AI is taking away old jobs but creating brand new ones we’ve never seen before.
Regular People Win This Time Starting with ChatGPT
Andrej Karpathy from Google noticed something since the launch of ChatGPT: For the first time ever, regular people are getting more from new technology than big companies. Usually it works the other way. The military gets it first, then big companies, then us. Think about computers or the internet.
But with AI? Different story. ChatGPT has 400 million users who use it for homework, coding, writing, everything. Meanwhile, big companies are still trying to figure out how to use it without breaking their old systems.
This matters because it means you don’t need to work at Google to access powerful tools anymore. The same AI that helps billionaires is on your phone for free. As Karpathy says, regular people have never gotten this much power this fast.
How Prediction Markets like Polymarket Show Us the Future
Ever heard of Polymarket? It’s a website where people bet on what will happen, like who will win elections or if Taylor Swift will announce a tour. Turns out, these betting markets are right 92% of the time. News experts? Only 65%. (skin in the game = better research).
Now imagine the same thing but for content (e.g., memes). Instead of guessing what will go viral, creators compete to make the best content. Winners get paid. And you don’t need a college degree, you just need to understand what draws people’s attention and engage.
Platforms like X function as prediction markets for culture itself where creators are paid based on their engagement. A decade ago, “social media manager” wasn’t a job. Today, it’s essential for every company.
AI Helps Humans, It Doesn’t Replace Them
The fear that AI will replace creative jobs misses the point entirely. AI has become infrastructure that amplifies human creativity. ChatGPT can generate a thousand variations of any image, but it still struggles to predict which will resonate culturally.
Cultural intuition becomes more valuable as AI floods the internet with content. In a world of infinite AI-generated material, curation and cultural understanding become scarce resources.
Humans will leverage AI to create new forms of value that neither could produce alone.
Schools Are Teaching AI Literacy and Memes: A New Workforce Requirement?
Stanford has a class about memes. MIT studies how things go viral. Companies now require “AI literacy” even for non-tech jobs. But the real education is happening on TikTok and Twitter, where teenagers make more money than their teachers by understanding internet culture.
This skill set carries particular value because it resists automation. AI can analyze engagement metrics, but it still doesn’t understand why Gen Z suddenly decided that Roman Empire memes were funny. It can track virality patterns but can’t predict which obscure 2003 movie will become next week’s meme format.
This skill, knowing what will go viral, can’t be hasn’t been taught to AI (yet). And that is the edge in this market.
From Gig Economy to Attribution Economy
Picture a world where:
There are new tools being made that let people keep credit for what they make online forever. These tools will be super important as AI starts creating on it’s own too. But these tools are just the base layer. Whole new ways to earn money show up when people can prove they made something first and that it’s valuable.
Being smart about what’s going to get big online is more and more being seen as a real skill you can get paid for. The tech for this kind of world is being built right now.
From Hackathons to Memeathons: The New Talent Pipeline
Remember hackathons? Facebook used to run them for recruitment by putting some cracked devs in a room for an all night coding competition. That’s how they invented the Like button. Universities are now running “memeathons”…same idea but for memes.
Students compete to create viral content. Brands sponsor prizes. Unlike hackathons where you needed to code, anyone can win a memeathon. Different memes work for different audiences. And if you understand some corner of the internet, you can compete for engagement.
Even though AI makes it easier than ever to generate “good” content, the gap is widening between ‘AI slop’ and ‘taste’ every day and therein lies the opportunity. Memeathon winners are getting recruited to top startups and even launch their own brands with the funding.
Three Big Problems with AI We Need to Fix
The attribution crisis: creators don’t get credit when memes go viral. The “Distracted Boyfriend” stock photo became one of the internet’s most-used images, but the photographer got a one-time fee while brands made millions from derivatives. Now AI generates infinite variations making it impossible to track, let alone pay, original creators.
Platform architecture failure: social media’s economic model assumes free content from users. The business model requires extracting maximum value from user-generated content while paying nothing for it. These platforms literally can’t afford to pay creators fairly. Their whole business depends on people working for free.
The AI content flood: when all content is AI generated, it makes human outputs invisible. AI tools generate millions of images and texts daily. Without proof of human origin, discovering original human posts becomes nearly impossible unless the algorithm does the work for you.
What Happens Next
By 2030, saying “I’m a professional memer” will be as normal as saying “I’m a professional gamer.” Companies will hire meme consultants like they hire marketing consultants. Your parents will brag about your viral content like they brag about grades.
Sound crazy? A dog meme worth a billion dollars also sounded ridiculous five years ago. Now Doge has a $40B market cap…yeah Billion with a B. People said the same thing about streamers and YouTubers, now they make millions. The creator economy is worth $250 billion today. The meme economy will be worth even more.
Why This Matters to You
For once, regular people get the good stuff first. You don’t need rich parents or an expensive education. You need internet access and cultural understanding, things you probably already have.
Information is power, and being first to make that information cool and shareable is the ultimate power. When AI makes all content technically perfect, we crave what’s different. It’s about standing out in the crowd, being the needle in the haystack, the diamond in the rough.
When everyone’s using AI to make “good” content, the winners will be those who think differently. The ones who capture attention won’t be those with the best tools. They’ll be those with the best taste and timing.
Every big company uses memes in ads. Every politician tries to go viral. Every movement spreads through shareable content. The demand for people who understand this is huge.
As Karpathy says, “Power to the people.” The technology that usually goes to the powerful came to us first this time.
The tools exist. The jobs exist. The only question: Will you learn to use them, or watch other people get rich from skills you already have?
In five years, making memes for a living will be as normal as any other job. The revolution is here. Are you going to be part of it?
