Have you ever wondered why manhole covers are round instead of square? Or who invented the steamroller? Or why giant steel coils are transported on their sides instead of flat?
Sure, you can do a simple Google search to find out. But what you really might need is a video set to an AI-generated song that sounds like Taylor Swift if she went through a messy breakup with construction equipment.
This is Learning with Lyrics, which has an Instagram account with 900,000 followers and a TikTok account with 548,000 followers. I kept coming across these videos, so I did some investigating: I was surprised to find that a 21-year-old marketing major at California State University in Long Beach was behind the account.
It’s an illustration of what someone with an idea and access to off-the-shelf AI tools can make these days. It’s pretty fascinating.
“I’ve always been someone who’s curious about stuff,” Cashen Tomlinson told me about his inspiration for starting the channels, which launched in September. Tomlinson said he loved videos about how things were made, and came up with the idea to make some of his own, setting them to songs.
Tomlinson comes up with the ideas for the subjects of the videos: like how vending machines detect fake coins, how Post-it Notes work, or what causes airplane contrails. Then, he gets to work — with AI at his side.
“I use AI to generate a detailed research brief on the topic at hand, then I personally verify everything to ensure my facts are 100% correct,” he said.
Then, that’s where the catchy songs come in. He instructs Google’s Gemini to create a rough draft of the lyrics. “The real work during the lyrics creation is the polish, where I rewrite all the hooks, simplify or reword complex terms, reduce wordiness and increase clarity, ensure the outro is memorable, etc.,” he said.
Tomlinson then uses the AI music generator tool Suno to produce a song — often the same melody for different videos, with the sound of an AI-generated female vocalist.
For the visuals, he uses a mix of stock footage, his own custom animations, and video clips he generates with AI tools like Veo or Sora.
And yes, the girl in the profile image for the @LearningwithLyrics social accounts is also AI-generated.
i’m so very anti AI but her songs are getting GOOD #ai #comedy #fyp #learningwithlyrics
Tomlinson told me it usually takes him two or three hours to make the song, and about 5 hours total for each video. So far, he says he’s made a few thousand dollars through the TikTok creator rewards program, which was thrilling for a college kid.
While it may seem, at first glance, that these videos are aimed at children, Tomlinson says his main audience is 25-to 35-year-olds.
The comment sections show a devotion to the catchy songs. Some samples: “This is my favorite Taylor Swift song” (of course, it’s not her), and “How do I download this to my phone and listen to it on repeat forever?”
I watched one video about steel coils #learnwithlyrics #steelcoil #icecreamsandwich
It’s hard to describe exactly what’s so fun about these videos. Sure, they’re catchy, and “How it’s made” videos have always had an appeal. But there’s something about the AI voice that takes it to a level where you can’t totally tell if it’s ironic or not.
Tomlinson doesn’t think of this as brainrot, however. “I think the reason you might call it [brainrot] is because it’s so captivating and you can’t really look away from it,” he said. “But I think it’s kind of good that these videos are something you can’t look away from, because it’s something that’s actually teaching you something interesting.”
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