Opinion: We should probably stop engaging with the AI fruit dramas

Surely you’ve seen them? The AI-generated fruit videos touch on childhood abandonment, infidelity, and rising from the ashes of poverty. Their lore is so deep that they rival telenovelas and soap operas. Truly slop at its most optimal. But where have they come from? Who is generating them at this speed and velocity, and what purpose are they serving?

These AI videos are unbelievably absurd, which is what hooks audiences. The characters themselves are exaggerated and shape-shift in real time; it’s all the key signs of AI slop in the sense that nothing is refined and made with a pure heart. However, alarm bells started to ring after a while; there were hundreds of these videos on people’s feeds, different fruits in the same scenes, but progressively losing quality (not that there was much to begin with, which is telling). It seems that Nietzsche was right: when you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss stares back.

As Tiktoker @Clios_World highlights, these videos feel like industry plants, farmed on our feeds in order to feed the content train we’re all on. The rate at which they’re being churned out is suspicious, clearly prioritising quantity over quality, but this doesn’t feel careless; it feels more calculated. So what is the endgame? AI claimed to have a revolutionary impact on the arts and entertainment, but that promise still feels largely unrealised. And yet, with investors circling and profits being projected at scale, there’s too much riding on it to slow down now. It feels as though these videos are some sort of last-ditch effort by AI companies to potentially catch viewers’ attention.

Shape-shifting fruit in real time, insane and often suggestive plotlines, the things we love to spot and call out when it comes to AI. It’s inherently crap, and participating in the dogpile is part of the charm. Even commenting that “this is the kind of content that would make God weep at his own creations” feeds it. The companies that are potentially behind these videos don’t need your approval; they need your attention. Engagement is engagement, whether we like it or not.

An added layer to this is that a lot of these videos veer into the obscene, which makes the whole thing feel off in a way that’s hard to ignore. Talking fruit, rendered in the visual language of children’s content, suddenly pulled into something suggestive or outright explicit. It’s sinister to think about the prompts used to generate this garbage and whose attention they’re grabbing. These videos live on TikTok, where children are present, and they resemble the Cocomelon videos targeted at kids. This was a major alarm bell when AI-generated content started gaining momentum, and how it would be used to generate adult content. We’re now seeing that consequence in real time.

Ultimately, these videos feel like a trap, which we’ve fallen for. As the attention economy is studied and experimented on further and further, it’s easier for AI companies to trap us into a content tornado.

Not to be that friend that’s too woke, but it feels as though we’re becoming the beast we’re trying to defeat when we consume this slop.