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.

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 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.

Fruit Love Island has racked up hundreds of millions of views on TikTok.

“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.”
“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 actual productions.

It also raises the question—are some people going to prefer the AI series over the ones they’re inspired by?

Already, the answer is yes.

“How is Love Island gonna outdo AI Fruit Love Island ?” asked a TikToker with more than 70,000 followers, arguing that the AI fruit version was more engaging than the actual reality show.

She deleted the video after it started getting backlash, but other people agreed with her.

“I think TikTok was definitely a big part of that,” Cohen says about the audience’s shortening attention span and desire for compressed, sometimes AI-generated drama.

“It makes sense that people are intrigued by a one-minute clip, and then they’ll be like ‘Oh, I’ll watch another one-minute clip.’ You’re not committing to a full, heaven forbid, 20-minute episode.

Or 40 minutes.

Or an hour.

You can just watch one minute.”