asteroid
Explanation
The comic shows a person looking up at the sky in alarm and shouting: "Oh my God! That asteroid is headed straight for the old cemetery! I hope all the corpses are okay!"
The caption below reads: "This is what I imagine when people say AI will ruin social media."
The joke draws a parallel between two things that are already "dead" or ruined. Just as worrying about an asteroid hitting a cemetery is absurd because the people there are already dead, Weinersmith is arguing that worrying about AI ruining social media is similarly misguided because social media is, in his view, already ruined. The corpses in the cemetery cannot be harmed further, and likewise, social media is beyond the point where AI could meaningfully make it worse.
The humor mechanism is an analogy that functions as a sharp cultural critique. Rather than engaging with the common concern about AI-generated content degrading the quality of social media discourse, Weinersmith dismisses the premise entirely: social media is already so degraded that the arrival of AI is essentially irrelevant, like a catastrophe befalling something that has already been destroyed.
The hover text ("It's not actually a metaphor. I just think of that scene") adds a layer of deadpan absurdist humor by pretending the comic is not making a point at all and that Weinersmith literally just imagines this unrelated scene of an asteroid hitting a cemetery whenever someone mentions AI and social media.