This article contains potentially disturbing graphics and descriptions that are nonetheless viral on Instagram and other major platforms.
These are words I never thought I would type, and the people in my life who I have said them to have told me to immediately stop speaking. But here is how I would describe the type of AI generated reels that are popular on Instagram right now: Dora the Explorer feet mukbang; Peppa the Pig Skibidi toilet explosion; Steph Curry and LeBron James Ahegao Drakedom threesome; LeBron James and Diddy raping Steph Curry in prison; anthropomorphic fried egg strippers; iPhone case made of human skin; any number of sexualized Disney princesses doing anything you can imagine and lots of things you can’t; mermaids making out with fish; demon monster eating a woman’s head; face-swapped AI adult influencers with Down syndrome, and, unfortunately, this. Unfortunately, I swear to you that the screengrabs and videos I am including and linking to in this article are not the worst that I have seen on Instagram.
Other “niches” that have become popular on Instagram and which have begun to regularly pop up on my feed are wildly racist AI videos of Black men whose faces are put on dogs or gorillas, Black men storming KFC restaurants and chasing after watermelon, George Floyd opening a “Fent-Donalds,” Martin Luther King Jr. in a tub of green sludge, Anne Frank as a zionist cyborg, etc.
As I wrote last week, the strategy with these types of posts is to make a human linger on them long enough to say to themselves “what the fuck,” or to be so horrified as to comment “what the fuck,” or send it to a friend saying “what the fuck,” all of which are signals to the algorithm that it should boost this type of content but are decidedly not signals that the average person actually wants to see this type of thing. The type of content that I am seeing right now makes “Elsagate,” the YouTube scandal in which disturbing videos were targeted to kids and resulted in various YouTube reforms, look quaint.
“Brainrot” and creepypasta AI-generated reels are currently some of the most popular metas, or hyper-specific niches of content being made by the community of people who are creating and monetizing AI slop en masse.
I was able to find the creators of some of the viral brainrot Instagram reels I described above discussing their process for making them on a Discord called Interlink AI, which costs $30 to join and comes with guides to making AI reels. The Discord has specific guides for “brainrot” videos, “realistic” videos, and “pov” videos. As we have reported before, the creation of AI slop is very mechanical and replicable, which is why we see so much of it. Once a method for going viral is discovered, the person who discovered it often makes guides that they then advertise and sell, and other people in the community then begin copying them.
Instagram, of course, is doing nothing to stop the spread of this type of AI, and the Discord tells users that one of the best ways to make money from this type of AI is through Instagram’s Bonus program which offers “direct payouts.” This type of content is most popular on Instagram, but is also on YouTube and TikTok, though, anecdotally, it does not seem to perform nearly as well there. The Interlink Discord also warns people not to post real people or copyrighted characters to TikTok: "Steer clear of using protected characters or content that could violate intellectual property rights, such as popular TV or movie figures (like SpongeBob)."
In the Discord, members post evidence of their “wins,” meaning videos that have gone viral. “I would say 50 [Cent] liking this is a win,” a user who goes by “Dude” on Discord and “DudeOnGPT” on Instagram wrote next to a screenshot of an AI generated Diddy in prison. The screenshot shows the reel had been viewed 6.2 million times and liked 188,000 times, including by the rapper 50 Cent. The actual video that had gone viral was an AI generated video of Diddy raping Steph Curry in prison.
“Kiss me on my hot mouth, I’m feeling romantical,” the AI Diddy says in the video. An AI Steph Curry says to the camera “LeBron, I don’t like prison.”
“Just relax, Steph,” an AI LeBron says. “Ain’t no party like a Diddy party.” The next scene suggests Diddy and/or LeBron is raping Steph Curry in the shower. The Instagram caption for the video reads “LEARN AI VIDEOS IN BIO!”
Nearly every reel uploaded by the account, called DudeonGPT, features an AI-generated LeBron James, Diddy, Andrew Tate, Steph Curry, Mr. Beast, and other celebrities, and the profile links to a signup page for the Interlink Discord. DudeonGPT has 43,000 followers. Thumbnails on his page include Andrew Tate holding a cardboard sign that reads “Quick Suck for a Quick Buck,” LeBron on his knees with his tongue out, LeBron holding a sign that says “Will Goon for Food,” George Floyd trapped in “the backrooms” meme, etc.
A user on the Interlink Discord also notes that “animal style videos have been doing well recently,” on a screenshot of an Instagram post they uploaded where Steph Curry’s head is inside a polar bear’s mouth, which has more than 7.5 million views.
Users have recently discussed how it is easy to generate AI videos of either Steph Curry or LeBron James, but that it is hard to have both of them in the same frame at the same time: “I try and it makes a weird mixture of them lmao,” DudeonGPT posted.
“Unfortunately this feature isn't great with LeBron and Curry yet, that's why we have them separate in each scene. The reason why you see accurate images of Ronaldo and Messi together is because the Ideogram image generator is really great at creating Messi and Ronaldo only," another user responds. "We are looking into ways to make them into the same scene, but for now we think it's not worth adjusting the scale to make them in one scene."
The same user then notes that a Chinese tool called Ideogram "is great at creating realistic images of LeBron, but is terrible at creating Curry or any other NBA players. Like you could put LeBron, Messi, Ronaldo, Trump all in one image generation, and it would be good."
Brainrot AI relies on specific, very popular AI tools that are doing little or nothing to prevent abuse, social media algorithms that promote this type of content, and the fact that seemingly no consequences have come to the platforms or AI tools for not moderating against AI content that uses real people or copyrighted characters owned by multibillion dollar corporations. The creation of AI reels has gotten both easier and more sophisticated over time, with spammers chaining together different tools to create reels with identifiable people and copyrighted characters.
What spammers have realized, for example, is that ChatGPT's anti abuse filters will prevent it from making realistic videos of real people, but that ChatGPT is good at actually writing the image creation prompts that can then be used in other tools. So ChatGPT is writing AI prompts to generate real people and copyrighted characters, but is not actually generating the images themselves.
A guide in the Interlink Discord suggests copy pasting a templatized version of a prompt into ChatGPT. "The image I want to generate is an image of LeBron laughing in the Lakers' training facility," a guide video says. "So you should write 'I want a prompt for LeBron James, in his yellow Lakers uniform, wearing number 23, to be laughing in the Lakers training facility. ChatGPT will generate a detailed, ultra realistic prompt to help bring your image to life."
That ChatGPT-generated prompt is then dumped into a tool called Krea, which uses an image generation model called Flux. The image that comes out of Krea is then put into a Chinese video creation model called Kling, which makes the actual video. The Discord contains additional guides for how to troubleshoot anything that goes wrong, and has separate base prompts for making AI videos of cartoon characters like SpongeBob, Shrek, Dora the Explorer, Peppa Pig, etc. "Make me a prompt for a large group of SpongeBobs running toward a tall neon KFC building at night," one instruction to ChatGPT reads.
Victor Perez, the CEO of Krea, markets his software with lofty ideals: “Ideas get lost if we lack the means to bring them to life. Self expression becomes limited by creative mediums. Our work gives full creative freedom to anyone with something to tell. AI handles the ‘how,’ while you focus on the ‘what.’”
The “what” is “brainrot of Dora the Explorer riding a surfboard of shit” and “the imagined prison sexual assault of real-life basketball player Steph Curry.” Monetized “brainrot” reels is generative AI’s killer app; this type of content is how people are making money with AI, and it’s the ability to create this type of content that its users are so excited about.
