The Rise of “Brainrot”: AI-Generated Absurdity Flooding Social Media

A shark on a motorcycle wearing giant sneakers, a frozen chicken with Mark Zuckerberg’s head, a fictional character named Tung Tung Sahur (an anthropomorphic wooden stick) enjoying a chimpanzee-banana… Social networks are now flooded with millions of short videos generated en masse by artificial intelligence (AI). Their goal? No longer to please the viewer, but to surprise them with the absurd, the bizarre, or even the crude: welcome to the era of brainrot.

Roughly translated as “cerebral decay,” the phenomenon is so significant that the University of Oxford chose the term as its word of the year in 2024. And while, marginally, some creators approach it as a new aesthetic of the absurd, brainrot is not really the work of a few connected surrealists. It is primarily a market structured by a multitude of actors seeking quick profits.

This starts with the sale of online training courses. On TikTok and other Instagram platforms, most popular brainrot creators (those aggregating tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of views) resort to this traditional source of revenue in the digital economy.

“Brainrot” Expertise

Specializing in Italian brainrot (a sub-genre characterized by absurd characters like the aforementioned Tung Tung Sahur, Brr Brr Patapim, or Cappuccino Assassino), Mr. Trallaloo sells a PDF for 35 euros simply titled “Create and Master Your Own Brainrot Universe. The Ultimate Visual Guide to Exploding on TikTok.” Fusion Boy, an account generating videos of presidents Vladimir Putin as a Labrador and Donald Trump shirtless merging with an eagle to become a griffin, directs users to a video training course accessible for 70 euros. As for The POV Lab, producer of videos placing the viewer in the position of a Japanese pop star in the 1980s or Mark Zuckerberg’s newborn during childbirth, it monetizes its “expertise” for 22 euros. “In the first months, I was selling four guides a day,” assures Hogne, the 27-year-old Norwegian owner of the account.

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