The 'This Meme Does Not Exist' phenomenon originated from an AI-powered project by Imgflip that used deep learning to generate captions for popular meme templates. Trained on millions of public memes, the AI often produces results that are nonsensical, surreal, or accidentally profound, leading to a massive surge in popularity during early 2020. This style of meme represents the 'absurdist' era of internet culture, where the lack of human logic becomes the punchline itself. Users often share these creations to highlight the weirdness of machine learning or to find humor in the total randomness of AI-generated content.