AI Puking Horse

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About

AI Puking Horse or Horse Throwing Up In Gas Station refers to an AI-generated picture of a brown horse in a convenience store vomiting on the floor. The grainy nature of the image, making it look like it came from security footage, combined with the grass or oat-coloring of the vomit led to people mistakenly thinking it was real, unaware that horses are physically unable to puke. In August 2024, the image started to see significant usage by Yu-Gi-Oh! players who would post it in different variations on posts by Konami to troll the company. Elsewhere online, the artificial intelligence image is also used as a reaction and exploitable meme format.

Origin

One of the first instances of the horse puking image being uploaded was on the subreddit /r/horsejokes, on July 15th, 2024. In the post, Redditor u/SirSuccsAL0t^[1] uploaded the AI-generated image with the caption, "Horse customer" and no other context or punchline given, acting as a template for the meme (shown below). The post did not see significant engagement.

Spread

A month later, the trading card company Konami announced that it would release a ban list for the card game Yu-Gi-Oh by the end of August 2024. A ban list is meant to radically change the metagame by announcing which cards cannot be played or what quantity of certain cards can be used, so players were eagerly awaiting its arrival.

After the wait, however, some fans of Yu-Gi-Oh began to post AI Puking Horse as a reply to any post made by the official company's X / Twitter account, first seen on the August 23rd post by X user @PopeCheetosXIV^[2] (shown below) that received over 30 likes in 10 days.

that's not a banlist pic.twitter.com/NVaVqOJZxn

— Morgan (@PopeCheetosXIV) August 23, 2024

As the end of August 2024 arrived, players became more impatient with the lack of a ban list being posted. This led to them editing the image in order to maximize its spread and then continuing to post it on different marketing posts made by the company.

On August 29th, 2024, a post made by Konami about an upcoming release was inundated with several edits of the horse, including one by X user @albrock88^[3] in which they turned the image into a Yu-Gi-Oh card (shown below), receiving nearly 9,000 views and 200 likes in five days.