Memes (in the sense Dawkins used) have found easier replication into this new medium. Rather than jumping from brain to brain, with the intermediate step of writing, our old memes now replicate by language model. They do meaningful work when deployed without a human in the loop.

I think both humans and AI without training are stupid. Take a human alone, raised alone, without culture. He/she will be closer to animals than humans. It's the culture that is the locus of intelligence and we're borrowing intelligence from it just like the AIs.