What do you get when you let an endless feed of AI fruitslop videos loose on screen-addicted kids? A great recipe for violent extremism, it turns out.
A new analysis by researchers at the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET) argues that the AI-generated fruit videos infesting our feeds is a font for covertly spreading “violent and extremist content.”
Most of these reels seem inconsequential, featuring brainrot storylines of colorful — if sometimes pornographic — fruit characters navigating dramatic situations like love triangles, job loss, and brotherhood. Yet the GNET analysts observed that a rising number of fruitslop reels are verging into “AI fruit/vegetable gore,” depicting extreme scenes of torture, mutilation, and other cruel acts of violence.
These aren’t just generic depictions of brutality either, the authors observe. Many of these reels depict violent characters as belonging to specific groups or ideologies like criminal cartels, far-right groups, or extreme nihilism.
“Violence-based AI slops reinforce a fascination with violence for violence’s sake, thereby allowing the so-called online ‘ode to violence’ to progressively gain ground among young people within the digital space,” the analysts write. Further, this kind of slop can “lay the basis for the consumption of further violence-based audiovisual material, making young users fall into the trap of online radicalization and audiovisual violence consumption.”
Ultimately, it remains to be seen whether the claim that AI is driving kids to violence actually bears fruit in academic studies, as GNET’s report is largely a surface-level analysis, and inadvertently references at least one AI-generated editorial. (It also bears mentioning that GNET is the research arm of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a group funded and run by representatives of the tech industry which has been criticized for its role in advancing digital censorship.)
And really, whether AI fruitslop is leading kids to embrace violent extremism is beside the point. This kind of content is being churned out by bot farms at an industrial rate, dragging all of us — kids especially, since their media literacy is still developing — into a recursive nightmare of algorithmically-driven slop, which can be made to glorify violence just as easily as electoral fraud, racism, and any other social ill you can think of. Regardless of the particular depravity on display, that limitless potential is what makes gen-AI slop dangerous, full stop.
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