guides
What Is 'The Missile' And Why Are People Using AI Voices To Talk About It?
When it comes to online memes, one of the oldest formats found is the copypasta, in which a story or paragraph is repeated and referenced as a joke itself. One of the oldest copypastas, coming from all the way back in 2003, is "The missile knows where it is", but why is this two decades old meme suddenly re-appearing in our timelines and meme compilations?
Where Did The Missile Come From?
In a 1997 Air Force training video, the missile was talked about in the third person, as a thing that has a job to do, and this feeling was later enhanced when a recording was posted to YouTube, along with an accompanying picture of a missile. This missile would later go on to be the one used in several other meme videos, and over the years has become a main character in that things are focused on or about the Missile.
Why Are People Talking About The Missile Now?
The copypasta about the missile has always been subject to having slight changes done to it, using the general frame as a template and inserting different words or phrases to change the overall meaning of the paragraph. With the advent of AI voices, however, and the recording of the missile copypasta being long enough to use as material to train an AI voice, now these little changes to the script were able to be audibly heard, making all manner of memes about the missile being lost, or sleepy, or accepting of it's fate, able to be made and quickly shared.
How Do I Make A 'The Missile Knows Where It Is' Meme?
Most of the AI video missile memes are made using ElevenLabs AI, which lets anyone submit a script for the voice to read, making it very easy to create different versions of the copypasta, or even put in entirely different copypastas and use the voice of the original missile video.
For the full details on the Missile AI Voice meme, be sure to check out our entry on the meme for even more information.