Is it ok to upload joke papers to arXiv? I have recently stumbled upon this paper on arXiv: 
 Stopping GAN Violence: Generative Unadversarial Networks  (mirror), which is a parody/joke paper.

Is it ok to upload joke papers to arXiv?
There is a long tradition of posting joke papers to arXiv on or around April Fool's Day, especially in astro-ph - see the list below. The fact that all these papers were approved for arXiv offers some evidence (though not proof) that joke papers are okay.

It's probably best to limit joke papers to around April 1, though, when people know to be on the lookout for this stuff - or at least provide some indicator which is very clear to experts in the field that the paper is a joke, such as listing it as being submitted to SIGBOVIK or the Annals of Improbable Research.

A history of arXiv joke papers

(mirrored on my website)


Superiority of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) over Steward Observatory (SO) at the University of Arizona (2002)
On the Utter Irrelevance of LPL Graduate Students: An Unbiased Survey by Steward Observatory Graduate Students (2002)
Cosmic Conspiracies (2006)
Natural Dark Energy (2007)
Down-sizing Forever (2008)
Time variation of a fundamental dimensionless constant (2009)
Galaxy Zoo: an unusual new class of galaxy cluster (2009)
Orthographic Correlations in Astrophysics (2010)
Schroedinger's Cat is not Alone (2010)
Non-standard morphological relic patterns in the cosmic microwave background (2011)
On the influence of the Illuminati in astronomical adaptive optics (2012)
Gods as Topological Invariants (2012)
The Proof of Innocence (2012)
On the Ratio of Circumference to Diameter for the Largest Observable Circles: An Empirical Approach (2012)
Non-detection of the Tooth Fairy at Optical Wavelengths (2012)
Pareidolic Dark Matter (PaDaM) (2013)
A search for direct heffalon production using the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (2013)
Unidentified Moving Objects in Next Generation Time Domain Surveys (2013)
Conspiratorial cosmology - the case against the Universe (2013)
"Winter is coming" (2013)
The CMB flexes its BICEPs while walking the Planck (2014)
Bayesian Prediction for The Winds of Winter (2014)
A Farewell to Falsifiability (2015)
Beyond the New Horizon: The Future of Pluto (2015)
Astrology in the Era of Exoplanets (2016)
An unexpected new explanation of seasonality in suicide attempts: Grey's Anatomy broadcasting (2016)
Pi in the sky (2016)
SET-E: The Search for Extraterrestrial Environmentalism (2016)
Stopping GAN Violence: Generative Unadversarial Networks (2017) (the example from the question, included for completeness)
A Neural Networks Approach to Predicting How Things Might Have Turned Out Had I Mustered the Nerve to Ask Barry Cottonfield to the Junior Prom Back in 1997 (2017)
On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)
Detecting the Ultimate Power in the Universe with LSST (2017)
Sitnikov in Westeros: How Celestial Mechanics finally explains why winter is coming in Game of Thrones (2018)
Independent Discovery of a Sub-Earth in the Habitable Zone Around a Very Close Solar-Mass Star (2018)
Colonel Mustard in the Aviary with the Candlestick: a limit cycle attractor transitions to a stable focus via supercritical Andronov-Hopf bifurcation (2018)
The Long Night: Modeling the Climate of Westeros (2019)
Worlds in Migration (2019)
Forecasting Future Murders of Mr. Boddy by Numerical Weather Prediction (2019)
A new kind of radio transient: ERBs (2019)
Novel approach to Room Temperature Superconductivity problem (2020)
Quantum Godwin's Law (2020)
An Artificially-intelligent Means to Escape Discreetly from the Departmental Holiday Party; guide for the socially awkward (2020)
The search for life and a new logic (2020)
Making It Rain: How Giving Me Telescope Time Can Reduce Drought (2020)
Searching for Space Vampires with TEvSS (2020)
A PDF PSA, or Never gonna set_xscale again -- guilty feats with logarithms (2020)
Defining the Really Habitable Zone (2020)




Note: since this has become what I think is the most comprehensive list of arXiv joke papers I know of, I've made it community wiki so anyone can add to the list. Any additions should be clearly joke papers and, in keeping with the topic of the question, must be posted on arXiv.