A female fox cheating on a bear with a cobra and birthing a baby cobra. A cinnamon stick slurping up a cafe latte’s brain and being poisoned by her. A gold-digging cat dumping her husband and child. A banana impregnating two sultry grapes and then abandoning his babies for a coy papaya.
These four videos alone have amassed more than 2 million likes on TikTok.
Across social media platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, AI-generated slop is subverting and sexualising children’s cartoons. And many of these clips are going viral.
If the idea of grapes, cats, foxes and teacups with breasts is not disturbing enough, these animated characters also act out misogynist plots. Common themes include cheating, paternity tests, humiliation and violence. Female characters are stereotyped as gold-digging, dishonest or vapid.
The combination of child-like cartoon characters and soap opera themes is so absurd that many netizens watch till the end. And this prompts the algorithm to feed them more of such videos.
It may seem harmless – a little mindless scrolling – but this is not just brain rot. Experts warn that such videos can shape gender dynamics and social norms over time.
SHOCK CONTENT SELLS
Extreme content and polarising views on social media are not new. Algorithms push such content because they elicit stronger emotional responses and lead to longer engagement. However, the ease of AI content creation has taken this to a whole new level.
Before generative AI, an animated short video used to take days of scripting, storyboarding, illustration, animation, voice recording and editing, and involve multiple content creators. Now, it can be produced by a single person in minutes with a few AI tools that cost less than a couple of hundred dollars in total monthly subscription.
As a result, many content creators are flooding social media with AI content, which is pushed out by algorithms. According to one report, more than 20 per cent of videos shown to new YouTube users are AI slop.
“Most social media platforms reward volume and visibility, not content quality,” said Natalie Pang, head and associate professor at the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore.
“Misogynistic tropes can provoke emotional reactions which contribute to one’s visibility (on social media). Algorithms are often trained to recognise trending content, so content that triggers many reactions and are consequently shared and discussed, is often amplified,” Assoc Prof Pang explained.
