Before you make your morning smoothie, imagine: A woman with a cherry head tells her husband, who also has a cherry head, that she is pregnant.
Go to the hospital delivery room. A baby was born…and it’s a zucchini.
“He looks just like your boss,” the man exclaimed.
The dramatic scene, played out in a 60-second Pixar-style animated video, ends with a husband weeping as he grapples with his wife’s infidelity.
It’s a classic example of AI “fruit slop,” a genre that has racked up millions of views on TikTok and Instagram, generating reactions and parody videos from users hooked on the gripping story centered around romance and betrayal.
Think of it like a smartphone soap opera. Only the stars are lustful anthropomorphic strawberries and bananas, with names like Strawbelina and Bananito.
One user commented on the TikTok video, saying, “I’m embarrassed that I’m investing this much.”
”[This shit] make me cry [for real]” wrote another.
“The perfect formula”
Fana Johannes says this is the “perfect formula” for social media right now.
“It’s stupid, it’s brain rot, and it’s a contagious format,” said the California-based trends curator and digital strategist.
All Fruits AI version of reality show love island User @ai.cinema021’s work is the latest hit, and the account has 3.3 million followers on TikTok. One “episode” has been viewed over 39 million times.
As for the human mastermind behind it, well, that part is unknown. The most popular AI fruit slop videos are posted by anonymous, faceless accounts. Technically, anyone can make it.
She says the trend appears to have started with Object Talk, a ChatGPT feature developed by AI Century that generates scripts that can be connected to AI video generators.
Johannes said he first saw this style of video late last year in the form of an educational tutorial. For example, a conversation about water droplets moving through the human body explains the importance of hydration. By late February, they had evolved into…this.
“It went from tutorials to vulgar microdramas, and those microdramas have now transitioned into reality shows,” she said.
Videos often reuse storylines, with little change other than the fruits and vegetables included.
But some venture into more disturbing territory, such as domestic violence, sexual assault, and murder. In one video, a baby cucumber is picked up by a bearded banana man and taken by boat to “Bananastein Island.”
Some are reversing the trend and creating their own live-action versions. Instagram user @shlatfish_ dressed them up in fluffy fruit costumes, and user @lasting.lemons created a voiceover video and drew faces on the fruit with a Sharpie.
Big brands are also getting in on the action. Last week, Walmart Canada posted a banana on top of a pile of apples in the produce section with the caption, “Just found Bananat and Applelina. Poor Strawberrylina.”
“It’s funny because it’s bad.”
There was considerable backlash.
When pop star Zara Larsson posted about fruit slops to her 9 million TikTok followers last week with the caption, “Sorry I can’t hang out today, I have to see what’s going on with Choclatina and Strobelt,” some fans got mad at her, thinking she was promoting generative AI. Her video appears to have been deleted.
Some users have posted a human take on the drama, with an underlying sense of guilt over the environmental impact of AI data centers.
Adam Aleksik, a New York-based linguist and content creator who studies AI slop, says just because people enjoy the sloppy drama doesn’t necessarily mean they feel bad.
He says people watching Fruit Slop understand the artificial quality and creepiness of the video, as opposed to AI clips that try to fool people by making it look real.
“It’s funny because it’s bad,” he said.
“Sure, there’s some kind of inherent drama that draws people in, but on a meta level everyone knows this is just shitty content, and that added awareness is part of how we view these videos.”
Microdramas – quirky stories delivered in 1-2 minute chunks in a vertical aspect ratio – deliver soap opera content directly to people’s social feeds and have proven to be big business.
According to Alexic, people have been “watching dirty jokes forever” from pulp magazines to soap operas to reality TV, and even if the “human element” is removed, people are drawn to classic stories of love and cheating.
He says it’s important to place Fruit Slop in the context of its predecessors, such as the “Orange Cat” video, which followed the absurd adventures of an AI domestic cat, and the “Italian Brainlot” trend, which featured characters like Cappuccina, a ballerina who drank coffee cups to her head.
“They just need your attention.”
But there’s a dark side to this tilt, says Alexik.
He said the AI slop creators he’s spoken to tend to focus on finding the right formula to go viral, even if it turns into fodder for outrage. This can be especially problematic if the creator is anonymous, he said.
“They’re trying to do something quickly to get views. They don’t have a strong moral code,” he says.
Pointed out that one of the fruits contained homophobic content love island He said these AI trends tend to fade before they disappear, with creators trying to hang on by creating increasingly extreme and offensive content to maintain income.
Anatoly Guluzud, a professor and co-director of the Social Media Lab at Metropolitan University of Toronto, worries that AI trends are “polluting” people’s social media feeds, leaving less room for educational or other useful content.
But he points out that even haters are encouraging involvement with slop dealers.
“They need you to hit the like button, comment on it, try to discredit it, try to tell them how great it is,” he said of Fruit Slop’s creators.
“It doesn’t matter. They just need your attention.”
