As pointed out in the comments to the Know Your Meme article, this was originally generated by a GAN and posted on Instagram by @busyrotting, who isn't credited in the article at all.

Unfortunately their profile [1] is gone, and the Internet Archive doesn't seem to have saved the post [2] either. Nevertheless, we've looped back to neural networks again.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/busyrotting/

[2] https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu2IkGylneb/