
philip matarese
15.3K posts

philip matarese
@philorphilip
cocreator of the HBO show Animals.


Hundreds of videos of cartoon food characters, rendered in brightly colored Pixar-style animation, acting out heart-wrenching plot lines have been going viral. There’s the homophobic clementine that kicks his gay clementine son out of his house when he catches him experimenting with a strawberry (1.8 million views). There’s the pregnant broccoli that dumps her broccoli child in the trash, only to FaceTime him years later begging for forgiveness (2.1 million views). Many of the videos in this genre are silly, but others have distinctly misogynist or racist subtext. Yet people can’t seem to turn away. At first the videos were somewhat educational, according to Fana Yohannes, a trend curator and digital strategist. But over the past few months, Yohannes has watched the trend shift from practical advice to narratives featuring extreme human emotions — separation, terror, betrayal. The more heightened the drama, the more viral the post. “It seems like it went from a tool to create educational content to something people can use to make a quick buck and farm engagement,” she says. She refers to the talking-fruit videos as “the first-ever custom-GPT-generated social-media trend.” We’re already aware of how AI-generated content can collapse our ability to distinguish what’s fake from what is real, “but the talking-food videos indicate that AI isn’t just getting better at messing with our heads — it’s going to get better at messing with our hearts as well,” writes E.J. Dickson. Read Dickson on how fruit and vegetable AI slop videos are tapping into people’s emotions without actually earning it: nymag.visitlink.me/yDFeeW


On Broken Wings - Some Of Us May Never See The World (2003)







Most underrated state has got to be New Jersey.



















