Simulated clips of AI fruit babies have been circulating on many social media platforms, gaining popularity with Louisville students. The short clips feature an animated looking fruit opening its mouth and taking a bite of another piece of the same fruit. Cute, right? 

Well, apart from the question, “is this cannibalism?”, the cute beady eyes and tiny pink tongues distract away from any moral issue you may have with the image. There are many different well-known ‘niche fruits’, referred to as niche because they are not for everyone and some people are disturbed by the material.

“They make me vaguely uncomfortable,” said Anya Fierson ’27.

The most popular of the AI fruit babies are the apple, the banana, the mango, the blueberry and the starfruit. The memorable AI apple’s expression is what kickstarted this phenomenon, mainly consisting of Tik Tok slideshows rating the fruits’ cuteness. The average amount of likes on this kind of content ranges from 25,000 to 250,000 each, which qualifies this trend as a widely known and appreciated AI contribution to the ‘brain-rotted’ community.

How it applies to “brain-rot”, however, or the compilation of memes that circulate between teenagers online, is truly unknown.

AI on the internet has caused issues in the past, usually producing six-fingered people or clearly yellow tinted stickers. Unfortunately, some distortions are similarly present in clips of the adorable fruit babies.

As we realize that these beloved emoji-like images are not in fact made by humans, it raises the question if we should be supporting this trend at all; should we risk our environmental credibility to giggle at strangely endearing fruits chomping away on a piece of… themselves?

However, not all hope is lost for our fascination with infantilized fruit. To combat the controversial use of AI creating these adorable images that we cannot seem to get enough of, there is online encouragement to ‘create your own.’

Some have resorted to dressing up melon balls with blackberry seeds for eyes and manually moving their tiny mouths around other pieces of similarly colored melon to simulate the clips we know and love.

The only issue with this solution is the enormous time commitment and the food waste created while creating on such a small scale. Because of these inconveniences, this non-AI alternative is not gaining nearly as much traction online. Maybe stick with good-old-fashioned-human-illustration.

Whatever your feelings toward AI and AI made content may be, the fruit baby visage has been burned into teenage consciousness, mainly for its adorable appeal and its weirdness that is oddly compelling.

If you’re interested in taking a break from killing trees with AI generation, take the 100% accurate quiz below to find out which AI fruit baby you are!