There’s Something Very Dark About a Lot of Those Viral AI Fruit Videos

Over the past five days, an Instagram account called FruitvilleGossip has racked up more than 300,000 views on a series of videos called Fruit Paternity Court.

Featuring a cast of AI fruit characters, the entirely AI-generated show pits a clementine mother of a baby tangerine against his prospective parent, Mr. Mike the mango. Then Dr. Lime delivers an envelope containing the results of a DNA test to the judge: Mr. Mike is not the father.

“Idk why I’m invested in the lives of these fruit people,” says one comment. But they aren’t alone. “Come on last episode please drop it tonight we need it,” begs another.

Across viral AI fruit videos, which have overtaken many social media feeds over the past week, one theme sticks out: women fruit characters facing humiliating scenarios and even violence.

Repeatedly, fruit women in the videos cheat on their fruit husbands and boyfriends, often getting exposed and losing everything. Fruit babies born out of wedlock are thus often the wrong variety of fruit. In response, the fruit women get slapped and berated, and sometimes the fruit baby even gets thrown out the window to its death. There are AI fruit videos that that heavily suggest acts of sexual violence. Fruit parents have sex with the friends of their fruit children. Fruit parents verbally abuse their fruit children. The fruit women and their fruit children also get chased by sharks, ground up in blenders, and boiled alive.

Bizarrely, a number of the videos punish female AI fruit characters just for farting, with fruit men repeatedly kicking them out of their homes and even jailing them for passing gas.

When asked why he thinks these kinds of narratives are so popular, the creator of Fruit Paternity Court, a 20-year-old UK-based computer science student who declined to share his name with WIRED, said over DMs that they get the most views. Making the characters “look as appealing as possible” and engaging in “super dramatic and scandalous” scenes is apparently what people want to see.

The Fruit Paternity Court creator says he was inspired to make AI fruit dramas after seeing similar videos take off. He says his videos are created with text-to-video AI generators like Google Veo, Kling AI, or Sora (OpenAI’s video generation app, which the company said will be shutting down soon in a surprise Tuesday announcement).

The creator even shared a prompt he said he used to generate a clip for one of his videos: “Anthropomorphic strawberry character with a sassy facial expression, small jeweled crown on her leaf, glossy red skin, thin cartoon arms and legs, hands on hips. Confident pose. Hyper-saturated colors, soft studio lighting, white background. Pixar-meets-brainrot style. Full body shot, 9:16 vertical format.”

The prompt specifying a Pixar-style animation is ironic considering that Disney’s deal with OpenAI to introduce its characters to Sora is dissolving. But in the land of Fruit Paternity Court, the company’s beloved animation style is still being repurposed to show fruit women cheating on fruit men and facing the consequences. Disney did not respond to a request for comment.

The largest AI fruits account so far is Ai Cinema, the maker of a parody AI series called Fruit Love Island, which has amassed more than 3.3 million TikTok followers in around 10 days. The AI series, which has more than 21 episodes and over 200 million combined views, follows roughly the same plot of the actual reality series.

In the earliest episodes, female fruits get into violent altercations with each other over competing love interests. They call each other names like “bald-headed bitch.” In the comments, fans of Fruit Love Island share memes, fan art, and opinions about the characters. (Even the shaming, judgmental attitudes toward the female contestants carries over to the AI fruits version.)

“It’s mimicking the actual violence against women we see on reality television,” says Jessica Maddox, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Georgia. “Reality TV, for all its faults, at least has a couple guardrails in place. Here, no one is stopping them. They can be as violent and misogynistic and aggressive as they want.”

While each Fruit Love Island bulletin board post (a TikTok feature where users can share updates with their followers) has been met with tens of thousands of emoji heart reactions, on Tuesday the series creator shared that nine of their videos had been taken down for “violating community guidelines.” They didn’t specify which ones, and TikTok didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. “People are very angry with my account, and I believe I am getting mass reported,” they wrote.

The AI videos have invoked both enthusiasm and rage, from both anonymous commenters and recognizable people. Pop singer Zara Larsson posted (and then deleted after backlash) a TikTok with the caption “Sorry I can’t hang out today, I gotta see what’s happening with choclatina and strawberto.” But as they steadily gain millions of views, even brands are showing up in the comments. The prebiotic soda brand Olipop showed up under one of the farting videos. The jerky company Slim Jim has commented on many Fruit Love Island videos. The trend emerged and evolved so rapidly that some posters think it’s an astroturfed movement to normalize AI slop.

“I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the comment sections on these videos actually, and it does not seem like bots. I clicked on people’s profiles; these are real profiles, thousands of followers, no signs of inorganic activity,” Maddox says. “People just like it.”

But even if the views and engagement are real, that doesn’t mean this content is profitable—yet. Maddox noted that because the accounts are so new, most likely aren’t yet enrolled in TikTok’s Creator Fund or other forms of social media ad revenue-sharing, because those usually require accounts to apply and have a certain number of views. But, Maddox says, the earning potential is huge, with the ability to earn thousands of dollars per video if they get millions of views.

AI fruit content started getting posted earlier in March, before Fruit Love Island, but many of the recently created pages clearly take inspiration from its success. There’s The Summer I Turned Fruity, based on the popular teen drama The Summer I Turned Pretty; The Fruitpire Diaries, based on the CW series The Vampire Diaries; and Food Is Blind, based on Netflix’s Love Is Blind.

Predecessors of this AI fruit content include the Italian brainrot characters like Ballerina Cappuccina and Bombardino Crocodilo and the Elsagate controversy. But with these AI fruit miniseries that attempt to follow a narrative across multiple segments or episodes, the clearest parallel actually feels like microdramas, vertical short-form scripted series that American big tech companies are starting to invest more in. Like the AI fruits, these are minutes-long episodic shows intended to perform well on social media, eventually directing viewers to paywalled sequels.

Ben L. Cohen, an actor in Los Angeles who is credited in around 15 of these vertical microdramas, sees at least one common thread between the AI fruit dramas and the shows he has worked on: They both feature “lots of violence toward women.” They also try to cram as much drama as possible into these short clips and have attention-grabbing titles in the style of “Alpha Werewolf Daddy Impregnated Me,” Cohen says.

“It draws people in, I think, seeing that jarring, absurd, cartoonish vibe. It’s cartoonish abuse, but it’s still abuse.”

Vertical microdrama acting work still exists in LA, which can’t be said for all acting gigs right now. Cohen has had conversations with other people working in the industry about how AI is already being integrated more into the videos, potentially posing a threat to the existence of human actors in clickbait content. After all, it’s much cheaper and faster to churn out AI fruit episodes than