And, of course, the way that viral AI slop works is by becoming more and more shocking — more and more extreme. After all, the more on the nose, the more we can’t seem to look away — and the more we watch, the more it creates.
“It started off as something that people engage with quite ironically, and then became very normalised,” says Kerry McInerney, an AI ethicist and Lecturer at the University of Auckland. “The trouble is satirical engagement, humorous engagement, earnest engagement — it all comes down to clicks and engagement. And so then that does encourage the further production of AI slop. Even if people are engaging with it ironically, that could still potentially lead us towards a world where people are really incentivised to make more and more and more of this kind of content.”
“There was a narrative maybe several years ago that tools like AI could be used to somehow reduce or address gender equality — that they could make things like hiring less discriminatory and more fair, for example,” adds McInerney. “And I think we’ve just not seen that play out in practice. Instead, I think we’ve seen AI has this exacerbatory effect, and we see that in everything from, like, AI slop content like this, all the way through to kind of other really intentionally malicious uses of generative AI, like the production of pornographic deep fakes.”
Ultimately, the reason for the AI fruit drama’s sexism comes down to a mixture of elements: “Creators [may be] drawing directly from online subcultures or deliberately reproducing such tropes because they are known to generate engagement,” says Tranchese. “It is also possible that the outputs are shaped by the training data behind generative AI tools, which may encode and reproduce existing biases, including content that aligns with what the models ‘predict’ will perform well with online audiences. All these dynamics might be at play at the same time.”
Ok, so AI fruit dramas are sexist — but does it really matter? Surely they’re just dumb, meaningless slop videos we can write off as a brief blip in the ever-changing landscape of social media trends?
“They seem very innocuous,” says McInerney. “You know, they’re not like some of the other AI-generated slop content that has been either very explicitly political or dangerous deepfake content used to harass and abuse. This feels small fry, comparatively; it seems really innocuous.”
But that doesn’t mean we should normalise — or watch, even ironically, “The normalisation of these outdated gender stereotypes is being given new life in AI slop. It’s easy to mindlessly consume it and share it and not think very hard about it. But then that does contribute to a culture where this kind of behaviour and these ideas are normal.”
Adds Tranchese, “It’s important to see these videos as part of a wider content ecosystem rather than as an isolated trend. Today it may be AI-generated fruit videos; tomorrow it will be something else. However, many of these trends recycle similar underlying narratives, often portraying women as inconsistent, superficial or emotionally manipulative. While individually trivial, these posts repeatedly reinforce the same sexist assumptions.”
She adds, “AI itself is not inherently harmful, but when it is deployed within broader societal and economic contexts that already contain inequality — in this case a patriarchal society that exploits inequality for profit — it can end up reinforcing those patterns.”
AI was meant to help free us from mundane tasks and open up new space and time for creativity and deep thought. Instead, I’m sitting here watching a strawberry get slut-shamed. Forgive me if I sound as bitter as a lemon, but this is seriously depressing and we deserve better.