The juiciest show these days isn’t “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” or “The Bachelorette.” It’s a class of raunchy, nonsensical, A.I.-generated TikTok telenovelas starring anthropomorphic fruits and vegetables having torrid affairs, breaking hearts and giving birth to produce babies.
In this genre, juicy is meant quite literally: The heroines and villains are apples, mangoes and strawberries.
The videos are the latest type of slop to take over social media feeds, where some users have described seeing an increasing amount of A.I.-generated content pertaining to groceries in recent weeks. At first, some said they were uninterested in the videos, which are often shoddily made — for example, the outfit a character is wearing will change from frame to frame within the same scene — but many soon gave in to the bizarre yet addicting videos.
According to Know Your Meme, one of the earliest cheating-fruit videos was posted at the end of February, and featured a strawberry cheating on her partner with an eggplant, resulting in an aubergine baby. In the final scenes of the clip, the strawberry’s husband — also a strawberry — clutches the purple newborn, sobbing and yelling that the infant looks like his wife’s boss.
The tropes feel akin to those on any number of reality television shows or soap operas, but, as with many A.I. slop videos, these clips have become increasingly nonsensical. Words are mispronounced and plot logic is almost nonexistent. In one variation on the theme, a female fruit heroine is kicked out of her home after farting in front of her partner. (Don’t try to make sense of this one, you will fail.)
These fruits aren’t the first inanimate objects to be given inner lives by A.I. The sudden rise of produce-starring slop feels similar to that of Italian Brain rot, an earlier A.I. trend heralded by humanlike cartoon characters with silly catchphrases. (Ballerina Cappuccina, a ballerina with a coffee cup for a head, is a particularly popular entry in the canon.)
And, like any effective rot, this one has also spread.
The videos have made their way from the fringes of A.I. TikTok into the mainstream. The pop star Zara Larsson said in a video on TikTok that she was hooked on the absurdist content, only to delete her post after being criticized for appearing to promote A.I. The celebrity plastic surgeon Michael Salzhauer, better known as Dr. Miami, has similarly posted multiple times about how he can’t stop watching A.I. fruit soap operas. Other fruit subgenres have also begun to spring up, such as a series mimicking the reality television show “Love Island” — if all the contestants were edible.
As the videos have become more popular, however, there has been one unexpected side effect: more videos about cheating fruits, but now made by actual human beings. The influencer Haley Kalil posted a video this month of her and several friends wearing face paint and cardboard fruit masks, parodying the genre. (The video took four hours to make, Ms. Kalil wrote in the caption.)
Jacie Tottleben, a 21-year-old college student at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Mo., recently grabbed a marker and a few strawberries and bananas to recreate one of the A.I. videos. “We do not support A.I.,” she wrote in the caption.
Caroline Deery, a 29-year-old content creator in Los Angeles, said she thought the escapism of the videos had helped propel them to virality.
“I think that’s why we watch them, because it’s like, it’s either that or you’re going to bed feeling like the world is literally going to be on fire tomorrow,” she said, describing the sort of heavy world news she also sees on TikTok. She prefers the momentary relief of the fruit videos, though they have gotten into her head, she said, so much that she finds herself regularly quoting some of their more ridiculous lines.
Kenneth Ray Yarbough II, 28, echoed Ms. Deery.
“Every time I open up TikTok, it is an escape, and now that I have this A.I. fruit, it’s something to entertain me for a few hours to just kind of get my mind off of what’s going on in the world,” said Mr. Yarbough, who lives in Houston and works in housekeeping at a nursing home. He posted a TikTok in which he stares at pieces of fruit in his kitchen, joking that he is waiting for them to start speaking.
Ms. Deery acknowledged that there were plenty of better, similarly melodramatic television shows she might watch on Netflix or Hulu, but said it was ultimately the ease of scrolling on TikTok that kept her watching.
“We’re just addicted to the tiny screen, the fast pace,” Ms. Deery said.
Madison Malone Kircher is a Times reporter covering internet culture.
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