Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Why AI Fruit Slop Is Taking Over Our Feeds w/ Kyle Chayka

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

Kyle Chayka is a writer for the New Yorker, and on this week's Power User he joins me to break down the rise of AI fruit slop dramas. Support my independent journalism:🙏 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/taylorlorenz      🗞️ Buy a paid subscription to my Substack: https://www.usermag.co     Millions and millions of TikTok users are tuning into an AI generated short form show called Fruit Love Island. On the show, AI generated fruits kiss, date, fight, and make up. The show has amassed an overnight fan base and spawned a slew of spinoffs including  The Summer I Turned Fruity, The Fruitpire Diaries, Food Is Blind, and Fruit Paternity court.  The world of AI content is being flooded by this bizarre phenomenon, amassing millions of views across TikTok trends 2026. The shows all use a viral content strategy to generate hits in minutes using tools like Object Talk and Leonardo AI. These AI generated videos allow faceless YouTube channels to monetize "attention arbitrage" for massive profit.Beneath these AI videos lies a dark undercurrent of sinister messaging. Because AI storytelling and algorithm psychology prioritize engagement, narratives frequently devolve into misogyny and graphic violence, showing fruit women being berated or fruit babies thrown to their deaths. By stripping away ethics, these social media trends deliver raw stimulation that keeps viewers in a state of stress.  We discuss:The evolution from AI Cat videos to Fruit Paternity Court.How "passive income" hustlers are using ChatGPT to script high-drama storylines involving betrayal and violence.The science of dopamine vs. cortisol and why this content keeps you in a hyper-stimulated stress state.Why brands like Olipop and Slim Jim are jumping into the fruit slop comments.The dark side of the algorithm: How AI content naturally devolves into the "lowest common denominator" of sex and violence.

It's not going to write you a literary novel. It's going to write you love, sex, violence, betrayal. That's kind of the lowest hanging fruit. And that's what AI tends to produce, period. Over the past few weeks, millions and millions of TikTok users have been tuning in to a short form AI generated show called Fruit Love Island. On the show, AI generated fruits, kiss, date, fight, and make up, the show has amassed an overnight fan base of millions and spawned a slew of spinoffs, including the summer

I turned fruity, the fruit pyre diaries, food is blind, fruit paternity court, and more. AI generated fruit slop has become inescapable across the internet. Pop singer Zara Larson posted, then deleted tweets about consuming AI fruit slop, and brands are even getting in on the mix. Kyle Chaka is a reporter at The New Yorker, and today he's joining me to discuss the rise of AI generated fruit slop and what these videos reveal about the media and entertainment landscape of today. We're going to discuss the future of Tate.

and the internet, whether these videos are actually destroying people's minds and what makes this fruit slop content specifically such a breakout hit. Hi, Kyle. Welcome to Power User. Hey, thanks for having me back. You know, I wanted to have you on to discuss one of the most important issues of our time, I think, which is the rise of AI Fruit Slop. I'm a long-time connoisseur of Slop, so I started to see these months ago.

But when did you start to encounter these videos online? I think months ago also, like in the midst of my TikTok feed. So not Fruit Island, but definitely, the, I don't know, spaghetti being poured into boiling water or kind of anthropomorphized food products more so than Love Island. But then I'm not a Love Island watcher. So I kind of had to reverse engineer all of these references. Yeah. I mean, AI Slop, I would say, really became pervasive in like 2023, into 2024. I did a story for the Washington Post on AI cat videos. I feel like they, that was the first breakout format where people were making these cute AI cat.

cat videos, they got increasingly disturbing to the point that people were doing AI cat video, like school shooting videos that were going viral on YouTube shorts. And then people started to kind of, it seemed like, evolve from the cat format into all these different genres. We had the rise of Italian brain rot. We had people kind of making their own AI characters. And the fruit stuff really seems to have taken hold around like earlier this year, like January, February-ish. It started actually with informational videos. So people making kind of like, especially on Instagram like life tips. So it would be like an apple and it would be like put me in the refrigerator so I don't get rotten you know and then it would like rot or whatever.

But it was like trying to provide like informational content initially because I think that was what was getting shared. It's like public service announcement vibe. Yeah. So for people that don't understand kind of like I mean maybe they've seen these videos I want to break down how people are making them because that seems to be this thing that people are wondering like is this a lot of work? Let me tell you it's not a lot of work. I've made these videos.

They take like five minutes to make, probably max. A lot of them are made using this program called Object Talk, which is a customized version of ChatchipT. So you can put in like a food item, like a chicken nugget or something. And it produces this detailed prompt for a Pixar style 3D render of, you know, a storyline. You can then take that prompt and put it into a video generation model like Open Art or I've used Leonardo AI. And you have, you have a video in just a few minutes.

Quick and easy frictionless production of AI fruit slop. And object talk is made by this company called AI Centuries, which advertises itself as a cutting edge AI tech company founded by two brothers on a mission to equip the next generation of AI creators. It's basically just like one of these like vibe coded kind of AI slop sites. I think what's interesting is like there is this whole industry around it where people are monetizing this content. And that's ultimately the goal. So like the people making this content are a lot of like teenagers, young adults, etc. That are sort of just doing trying to do like attention arbitrage on the internet and like create viral slop basically that that they can then like make a few bucks off of. Yeah.

I feel like there's a whole slop economy now. Like now the fruit slop is taking the place of influencer content or DIY videos or I don't know viral rants. So instead of actually filming yourself, you can just play around and make the latest genre of AI slop. and participate in the meme that way and get your attention that way. And it all monetizes just the same. Like you don't need to put yourself on camera anymore. Yeah. And you can hyper optimize it. Like I think that I mean, especially in 2020 with the rise of the creator economy in 2021 when all the VCs and tech people and it sort of went

mainstream people were like, wait a minute, you know, you can make a lot of money on the internet. Short form video can be monetized. TikTok launch their creator fund. A lot of people were like, well, I'm inherently not interested. Like I'm not a good influencer. So there's that barrier there. Then we saw the rise of faceless accounts. And now it's like, actually anybody can participate, as you said, in the influencer economy. You just kind of need to use AI to generate the right script. Yes. So it's kind of a degraded form of the influencer or creator economy where what you're creating is the AI output.

And I mean, it reminds me in a way of V-tubers also the anime avatar YouTuber community because that was also a kind of displacement of your own identity. And that was an avatar. But in this case, you don't need an avatar. are you don't need a human. You just need to be creative enough to write a script for a fruit slap and put it online. I think, you know, when I was doing the cat video stories, one thing that was interesting to me, too, was that there was a lot of people in foreign countries making these accounts, maybe because like the money that they were going to earn from them is significant,

like earning $15, you know, through Instagram Reels when you're in Indonesia, it goes a lot farther than if you're in Massachusetts. But I also think it's kind of ballooned into this global economy. I mean, there's videos on YouTube of how to make this content that have like millions and millions and millions of views and comments from people all over the world. Right. I mean, it's a global economy now. Maybe that's a kind of evolution of where social media was 10 or 15 years ago. Like it was more national. It was a little bit more local. And now everyone is kind of playing in the same sandpit. And you can make the same money. You can monetize with the same metrics wherever you are. And AI slop is the cheapest thing in the world to make and requires the least amount. amount of resources and energy as you probably discovered yourself.

So now it's just such a low- and common denominator thing where any kind of video content, any kind of cartoon that you can put online might make you money. And so you might as well just output a thousand of them and see what sticks. Well, I mean, speaking of that, right? Like what so what started initially to perform while was the life hack stuff. It was informational advice. Then it moved to kind of these more emotional story lines. storylines and actually creators of some of this fruit slop talked to Wired about it.

And they were talking about how these narratives featuring, you know, extreme human emotions, like separation, terror, betrayal go more viral, which is actually something the cat slop creators also figured out. Like, I feel like we just keep generating these same insights, you know, with every new forum. I mean, we've been around long enough to see that loop happen many, many times on the internet where I don't know, it's kind of version of, was it Hitler or Nazi rule where like whatever you start talking about on the internet inevitably devolves into Hitler. But at this time, it's like anything you post on the internet inevitably devolves into an

unhinged rant or violence, no matter if it's humans or fruit slap. Yeah, 100% or just these like extreme emotions, like sadness, terror, like betrayal. Like I don't know. It feels very adjacent to like microdrama culture, which we're also seeing a lot of, which like my werewolf husband betrayed me. Billionaire. We're a real billionaire. Oh, that's all the billionaire. The secret billionaire, right.

But it's like these very simplistic storylines that are, it really feels like the lowest common denominator of entertainment. It almost makes me think of mythology. Like, was Greek mythology the original slop where it's just the most basic archetypes of human existence? And we have like love and death and father versus son and then jilted lovers. And it's just like the most basic storytelling tropes played out over and over again in different skins. And in this case, it's like Love Island is one form of viral content, right? Like we're already watching this. It's already this ongoing drama.

So to merge one meme like that Love Island meme with another meme, which is fruit slop, you just get a more potent meme out of the two of them. Well, they're also, you know, what's so as a reality TV connoisseur, although I have not seen Fruit Slop's Summerhouse yet. But there's basically fruit slop versions of almost every other reality show. There's like food is blind. There would based off obviously Netflix's love is blind. There is like the you know, the fruit bachelor. Like it seems like what was appealing about reality TV is also this expression of like basic human emotions and like kind of simplistic storylines that are meant to evoke strong feelings.

Like I'm again, I just finished the most recent episode of Summerhouse and I'm just like it is a story of betrayal. and love gone wrong. And like, it's not that far of a jump to just make everyone strawberries and coconuts. Maybe because the people are already caricatures, like, they're so flattened and edited into one trope or other, like, the bad girl, the good guy, the golden retriever, Black Cat, whatever. They're simplified already, and thus it's like a really easy leap to imagine them just animated as fruits.

I mean, the visuals, I have to say, of Fruit Island. and slop are really compelling. Like, it's very shiny. It's cocoa melon coated. And people were saying like this is cocoa melon for adults. And it is. It is. It is kind of.

I'm trying to figure out what exactly is so appealing about it. And I think it's like the hyper saturated colors. I mean, it makes me even think of veggie tales. It's like sexy romance veggie tales plus reality TV. And how can you say no to that? It's funny because like, I mean, I feel like we ended, like we got to these more. more extreme human emotions. Again, we had like the AI cats doing school shootings and stuff like that. It always devolves into like violence or sex kind of where it's like in a lot of those

storylines are merged together. Cat Ten Barge wrote a really good piece and wired recently about kind of like the misogynistic undertones of a lot of these storylines. And she writes repeatedly fruit women in the videos cheat on their fruit husbands and boyfriends often getting exposed and losing everything. Fruit babies are born out of wedlock and are thus author. in the wrong variety of fruit. In response, the women get slapped, berated. Sometimes the fruit baby is thrown out the window to its death. There are AI fruit videos that heavily suggest sexual violence.

Fruit parents have sex with friends of their fruit children. Fruit parents verbally abuse their fruit children. And then I don't know if you've seen these episodes of fruit paternity court. Yes, yeah. But, you know, the 20-year-old computer science student who runs that account was saying that basically, like, the more dramatic and scandalous is like the more people want to see. and people like these narratives where the woman suffers. And that's disturbing to me.

Yeah, I mean, it's misogynist. The fruit videos are racist and misogynist and exploitative. And they, like, illustrate these very base, often violent situations. I mean, to me, it goes hand in hand with this need for just sheer engagement online. It's not like the fruit videos pretend to be something good or like wholesome or productive in any way. Like, Slop also implies this. kind of meaninglessness and amorality. Maybe when we had this human influencer and creator,

like when we're watching actual people, we expect some kind of quality and intention and following social codes. But when it's transformed into AI slop, that kind of morality or ethics go out the window, because it's obviously not real. And you can produce anything you want instantaneously. So you kind of get the most base impulses

and problems of society just like in this, shiny, attractive form. Yeah. And that is disturbing, I guess. Like, obviously it reveals a lot about kind of like underlying kind of human beliefs, I guess. I do wonder, like, and I've been covering a lot as well, like this sort of moral panic

around social media and the idea of like harmful content and blah blah, blah. I would argue most of that is speech. It's other users, whatever. We can, you know, have that debate another time. But watching these videos, I am like, surely this can't be good for society. And I don't know if that's just me, like, maybe buying into the moral panic, but I wonder, like, what the popularity of these narratives and these really stupid stories and this slop is doing.

Do I think it's, like, causing mental health problems among children? No, not necessarily. But, like, do I think that, like, the media that we all consume and create, like, shapes our world? Yes. And so, like, what does it say that this stuff is also just so, like, massively popular and being consumed by millions? Right. We can't look away from it. I mean, partly it's because it's evolved to.

engage our attention. Like the editing, the colors, the sheen of the animation, all of that stuff is so attractive to us. But it also reminds me of the artist James Bridle's essay from quite a while back, which was about those algorithmically generated or early AI children's videos on YouTube, where it was like uncanny valleys, superheroes and tropes and weirdness. And if you watched enough of them, you got to some very, very dark places. And I mean, it also shows just how unchecked content has run on the internet. Any kind of niche will be filled by this kind of slop. And now it's easier and faster to make than ever.

So I don't know. Like if we think this is causing a problem for society, then if we're trying to fix it, it kind of has to be at the source rather than at the consumption point. As in like regulating content? You want to make it illegal to tell the AI storyline? I don't know. I would argue for higher quality maybe. Like, you don't need to.

legislate anything, but if TikTok's algorithm was a little bit less twitchy on just sheer attention and indexed a little bit more for enduring meaning or quality, then maybe they would be a little less popular. There's two things on that, actually, that I, that I'm curious to get your thoughts on. I was talking to this really famous, well-known online safety researcher about the moral panic stuff about social media when I was at South by Southwest a couple weeks ago. And she was saying, like, you know, that there's this idea that social media is all about dopamine and you're getting dopamine when you do it. But you're not actually,

that's not true. Like you're not really, it's not really dopamine. And also it's great to get dopamine. So like you get dopamine from listening to music. Like is listening to eight hours of really good music because you're getting nonstop dopamine like dangerous? No. She said what social media and this is how she knows that it's not addictive, what social media does instead is it spikes your cortisol. Sorry, clavicular. And it sort of keeps you engaged in this like stress state. And she was saying like that actually shows that it's not addicting, but it does explain why people are so, like, hyper-engaged and also why they feel this, like, adrenal, like, exhaustion when they get off of it, because you've been in this sort of, like, stress state. And I think of that when I watch these videos, like, they are,

they are putting you almost in that, like, hyper-engaged stress state. Yeah, there are those, I mean, this is a bit of moral panic, but there are those videos of children who have been shown too many YouTube videos and they're, like, hyperactive and whatever. And when you take away their iPad, they're either angry or catatonic. But it's true that, like, that kind of, you video and that kind of editing induces this like state of hyperstimulation. And you're just, you know, you're not soothed by it. You're definitely not educated by it. But you are stimulated and you kind of can't stop watching.

Which is I think why people are like, oh, it's addicting. And it's like, no, it's just really compelling because it's stressing you out. And like, you can't really get addicted to something stressing you out, but you certainly can like develop these bad habits around it. And you certainly don't want to look away. Like that's true. Yeah. It can be compulsive for sure. And, you know, it's interesting.

too because like, I mean, you mentioned like the short form aspect of it, but the way that it's evolved over the past few weeks has actually been towards longer form narrative series. And I think that's interesting too because like people are like short form is the problem. Short form is the problem. But it's like, okay, but now we're getting people that are literally watching. I mean, they are broken up into short bits, but it is sort of like almost long form narrative. Like there are like storyline arcs, you know, in these like fake fruit reality shows. And so like I don't know that like longer content will serve us more, you know? No. I mean, That's kind of what interests me about these memes.

Like, they become an art form pretty fast. It's interesting that there are these long series of different videos. There are repeating themes and storylines. There's like a narrative pull to them. And that speaks to some kind of creative impulse on the part of whoever's making them. They're trying to tell a story. They're doing this iterative building of a world and stuff like that. So you can't blame it just on the format of a short

from video because, I mean, if you want to go catch up on all 21 parts of Fruit Love Islands, you can go watch it for an hour or something. It's kind of amazing. It's an epic saga. It truly is. I love the comparison to like Greek, like tragedies and stuff. Like I do. It is kind of just funny how we keep reinventing these things. That said, I do kind of wonder who's influencing these storylines, like who's writing them? Like, how is the AI shaping it? Like, with traditional entertainment, we do have a lot more transparency in those areas. And I think as people are increasingly using these like weird chat GPT like plug in type tools, like the one that everybody's using object talk, it's just a customized version of chatchee pt. So they're taking open AIs, LLM and like kind of

customizing it a little bit. And that seems to be how a lot of people are creating AI slop. And not only is there no visibility into open AIs LLM, but there's no visibility into these like weird customized versions of it. I mean, I just want to know like, you know, the fact that they are all devolving into violence against women, like, is that something that was coded into, you know, object talks, like output or whatever? Obviously, it's performing well as well. But I wonder what else would perform well. And like, just like the tech that's shaping these storylines, because the tech is writing

these storylines, AI is writing these storylines. Yeah. And so it's following the tropes that are programmed in or baked into whatever LLM this is using. And we literally have no way of knowing what those biases are, what kind of model or information is going into it. I mean, my theory would be is like all LLMs kind of go toward the same set of data, like human writing and human knowledge. And so I would bet that if you ask an LLM to write you a compelling storyline,

it's going to devolve so fast to like the most base stimulating tropes. It's not going to write you a literary novel. It's going to write you, you know, love, sex, violence, betrayal, family, drama, whatever. That's kind of the lowest hanging fruit. And that's what AI tends to produce, period. I don't know. Maybe I'm convinced that there's like something more nefarious here because I've seen like the people that are involved in these communities, it very much attracts like the AI hustle bro. It's the passive income guys. It's the like crypto adjacent Peter Thiel loving like, you know, these kind of like young nihilistic people that like I just don't know that they have the best intentions. And I do also wonder what they're going to do with the audiences they amass. Because as we saw with a lot of the cat video accounts, once that stopped trending, they pivoted. often to other AI content, but these pages can be repurposed to anything and they can be used to push propaganda, messaging. Not to say that I think, like, I don't think that like the RNC is doing

spawn con with like Fruit Love Island yet or whatever. But like as we saw with Facebook pages, which are I think kind of a similar iteration to this where like people would just make these massive Facebook meme pages and then like pivot them or do undisclosed political sponsorships, whatever. Like I do think these could be used for nefarious purposes, whether it's political or to push a certain reactionary agenda or whatever. And it's just extracting attention and monetizing it. I mean, I was looking at the the Fruit Love Island's account on TikTok today. And it has, I don't know, three million plus followers. It was the previous iteration was locked at four million. And it did just make me wonder, what do you do with that account once this is over? Like, once the meme is finished, you either have to fill the

vacuum and like try to pivot to the next meme or the next idea or I guess just devolve into the worst version of what you're posting and all the time you've captured a bunch of people's attention. Yeah, you sell off the account for profit too. I mean, it's interesting too that brands are getting involved. Like in the Fruit Love Island comments, you had the soda brand Olipop. They were showing up under other videos as well. I guess Olipop is really involved in the AI fruit slop world. Also, Slim Jim has commented on many of these videos. Like there's a bunch of brands. I think brands that are themselves like just desperately seeking to insert themselves into anything that gets them online attention, like they're hopping on this trend.

I'm wondering if we're going to see one of these brands sponsor an AI short form series. Like it's not beyond belief, you know, like they're already kind of, I'm sure they're discussing it at like Wyden and Kennedy or they're probably too high class, but some low level, you know, Vayner media. Right. I mean, it's happening right now. I think we can be guaranteed that a bunch of brands are pitching AI slot videos right at this moment.

I mean, I'm not opposed to it, you know, like it's fine. If they want to do some AI slop animations, that will be okay. People will probably have lost interest by that point. Like these cycles are so fast that the AI model will stay and the like content generation machine will stay. But Fruit Love Island is going to be gone and you have to kind of think of the next thing. Well, what do you think the next thing is? Like as somebody that pays so much attention to like algorithms and like kind of where social

media is going, like I also like covering the social media addiction. trial and seeing that stuff and thinking about like the types of content. I think we're about to get mass censorship on a level that we've never seen if things like the kids online safety act pass. And ironically, like COSA and these other laws actually wouldn't crack down on this type of content at all. What they would mostly crack down on is human content, like queer people, you know, again, abortion activists, like women's rights activists, et cetera.

And so I think that these, ironically, these like child safety laws, which don't protect children, but whatever, could even give this AI slap even more of a leg up online. Like, what trends are you doing? Because no other content will be left. If what we allow is this lowest common denominator, like, slop content and we suppress humans making more content, then that's all we're going to be left with. And that's kind of gross. I mean, I think it alienates users also.

Like, it's not in the long run. I don't think this kind of content is that sustainable. As we saw with OpenAI shutting down SORA, which was kind of a wall-to-wall slop feed. True. That was wall-to-wall slop. Although I was very interested because like I do think that and Katie Natopoulos wrote about this, but like SORA was incredibly popular in fetish communities and people were mostly using it to make fetish content, which is funny. It's the other law of the internet. If it's online, then you will make porn with it or out of it, I guess. To me, like, people were celebrating that SORA shut down and I was like, guys, that's not because it wasn't even inherently unsuccessful.

It's because it was requiring so many, like so much compute power. And currently, Open AI's run rate is insane. Anthropic is catching. up and they're pivoting B to B and like trying to compete more directly with Anthropic who never really wasted their time with a video model. So like that wasn't like some failure of the form because as we've seen Google nanobanana VEO3, whatever, like there are so many other video generation tools. And if you think of the previous iteration of like emotionally charged slop, I would say it was like those Facebook photos of like the disabled cat or child or whatever asking for money or veterans. But like that was all photo based. Now it's all moved to video. Video is obviously a more engaging format and video consumption on social media is only going up.

So like, I don't know, I think people were celebrating the death of Sora a little too soon and like they're winning the battle, but they're about to lose the war, you know? Well, in a way, Zora at least assured you that everything on it was AI content. Whereas all of these random video models and, you know, the Chinese one, C dance, the output of those is just going into every social media feed. And if you don't want the AI content, then it's polluting your, your, your, you're, you're feed and you have to do the labor of determining what is AI and what is not. So the AI video is going to be there regardless.

It's just a question of what container it's in. Okay. Question for you because you've been writing a lot about like taste as well. And we've talked about this on another podcast, but like Silicon Valley people are like obsessed with this idea of taste now. And if the internet is going the way that we're talking about where it's like, okay, human speech is completely censored and surveilled. Everything is becoming AI.

And also the AI content is becoming more and more sloppy. and cocoa melon-like and trashy. Why are all these people in Silicon Valley obsessed with taste? Like, is that a reaction to that? How do you square those two sort of phenomenons? I think it's like a Freudian insecurity thing. Like, they're obsessed with the thing they can't have and don't have. So because they're driving us on to this vacuum in various directions,

they crave the thing that could be an escape from that, which is human taste and human preferences. And I just think, I mean, I write about this stuff a lot. And as I'm sure you get PR pitches, so many people are pitching me on, oh, a social network for taste and AI model driven by personal taste. And I just don't think that is the answer, guys. Like, I think instead of thinking about more automation, more frictionlessness, let's instead think about how we can support human creators actually making human stuff.

And there are ways to do that. Like, I mean, many platforms support more human creators than ever. So those are about to be wiped out if we pass COSA. But yeah, I guess you're right. I also just wonder how much those will scale. It's like I also get the PR pitches that are like, kids are spending time offline. Kids love landline telephones. And it's like, no, you found three kids in Westchester

that started a telephone club. Like that's not any sort of trend. Like, I mean, chat GPT itself is the fastest growing consumer product of all time. Like people are using these tools. People are using these products. And people are consuming this media. Like that four million followers or whatever in 48 hours that that account got. Like that was organic.

Yeah. Yeah. People actually do watch it and they do engage with it. And it does mean something to them, right? Like this is entertaining mindlessness. And that's kind of what we go to TikTok for already. But I hope like we can get higher quality stuff in other spaces, even as we consume some degree of slop, you know, inevitably.

We all develop some taste. But not on a platform for taste. There is no platform for taste. There will never be, please go out to a library or go see a local base. Yes. Well, Kyle, thank you so much for joining me today. Yeah, this is a great topic to chat about. All right, that's it for this week's episode of Power User. If you like my work, you can buy a paid subscription to my Substack newsletter,

and it goes directly towards helping me produce this podcast every week. You can also support me on Patreon, where I do a monthly Q&A livestream. You can get my newsletter there also, and more. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Power User. See you then.