It's no longer about cancelling a problematic content creator on X, but the collective dislike for “Strawberina”, the cheating strawberry, that's bringing the internet together today. As Instagram’s recent surge of AI-fruit dramas continues, creators are exploring new plotlines that are generating millions of views. Brands such as KFC have jumped on the bandwagon, using it as a marketing opportunity and creating their own AI food drama to reintroduce their Twister Rolls. However, the latest plotlines in AI-fruit dramas are exploring more serious themes, reflecting more pressing issues in society.
As critiqued by Vogue, while the underlying current of liking the ‘Love Island’ episodes with AI-fruits or infidelity dramas featuring bananas and grapes initially seems satirical or humorous, observing the repeated plotlines reveals themes of misogyny conditioned from old plots. This can be attributed to AI models adhering to plotlines from their past sales database.
Areesha Khan, a 21-year-old graduate from Delhi, said: "I like watching these AI-fruit dramas because I don't have to think much. But I've started noticing how increasingly sexualised the women characters in these episodes are."
These fruit women are crafted in different ways to define the male gaze, with "gold digger" strawberries, infidelious cherry women, and child-abandoning apple mothers. The plots then tend to build on the negative emotions surrounding one of these fruit women's actions. This particular narrative, built around the adventurous, unsatisfied woman who leaves her husband or children, is constantly used in entertainment and has been widely critiqued in media studies for demeaning women.
However, these dramas have grown tired of these plots, moving on to different ones that explore themes like racism, genetic superiority, and gender-affirming surgery. A new series featuring bananas is gaining popularity, in which brown bananas are shunned by society and face difficulties in a yellow-banana-dominated area. Some viewers directly relate this to racial discrimination and genetic superiority, as the brown bananas also aspire to be yellow, seeking a golden cure to turn them yellow. Interpretations differ on whether these episodes directly reaffirm or challenge ideas of racial superiority.
A new series about a potato that feels like a lemon on the inside is also surfacing. The potato faces constant discouragement and shaming from his parents and schoolmates when he confesses. The potato finally becomes a lemon after a doctor's surgical intervention. For some viewers, this mimics gender-affirming surgery. Whether this desensitises the audience to the issues faced by the trans community is a question worth considering.
As the AI slop trend diversifies into new angles, it is important that creators and viewers alike pay attention to the parallels they draw with reality in a socio-economic context.