Have you ever wondered why manhole covers are round instead of square? Or who invented the steam roller? Or why giant steel coils are carried sideways instead of flat?
Sure, you can do a quick Google search to find out. but what are you Really You might want a video set to an AI-generated song that sounds like Taylor Swift after a messy breakup with a construction machine.
This is Learning with Lyrics, which has an Instagram account with 900,000 followers and a TikTok account with 548,000 followers. I’ve seen these videos so many times that I did some research. I was surprised to learn that a 21-year-old marketing major at California State University in Long Beach was behind the account.
This is a demonstration of what someone with an idea and access to off-the-shelf AI tools can create these days. It’s very attractive.
“I’ve always been an interested person,” Kashen Tomlinson told me about what inspired her to start the channel, which launched in September. Tomlinson said she loves videos about how things are made and came up with the idea of turning it into a song and creating her own video.
Tomlinson comes up with ideas for the subjects of his videos, such as how vending machines detect fake coins, how post-its work, and what causes contrails. Then, get to work with AI by your side.
“I use AI to create detailed research summaries on the subject at hand, and then personally verify everything to ensure the facts are 100% correct,” he said.
And then there’s the catchy song. He asked Google’s Gemini to draft the lyrics. “The real work while writing lyrics is polishing: rewriting all the hooks, simplifying or rephrasing complex terminology, reducing redundancy and increasing clarity, making the outro memorable,” he said.
Tomlinson then uses the AI music generation tool Suno to create the song. The same melody is often used in different videos, with AI-generated sounds from a female vocalist.
For the visuals, we use a combination of stock footage, our own custom animations, and video clips generated with AI tools like Veo and Sora.
Yes, the girl in the profile picture of the @LearningwithLyrics social account was also generated by AI.
Tomlinson said it usually takes two to three hours to create a song, and each video takes about five hours total. So far, he has made several thousand dollars through the TikTok Creator Rewards Program, which is exciting for the college student.
At first glance, these videos may seem like they’re aimed at children, but Tomlinson says their primary audience is 25- to 35-year-olds.
The enthusiasm for the catchy song is evident in the comments section. Some samples: “This is my favorite Taylor Swift song” (not hers, of course), “How can I download this to my phone and listen to it on repeat forever?”
It’s hard to explain exactly what’s so fun about these videos. Sure, they’re catchy, and “how to” videos always have an appeal. But there’s something about the AI’s voice that elevates it to the point where you can’t quite tell if it’s sarcastic or not.
But Tomlinson doesn’t see this as brain rot. “The reason you call me that is [brainrot] “Because it’s so fascinating that you can’t look away. But I think in a way it’s good that these videos are something you can’t look away from, because they actually tell you something interesting,” he said.
