crashing out about AI and italian brainrot

(just gonna clean this up a bit and post it even if it is a mess. this has been sitting unfinished for too long i'm sick of it.)

My brain needs to be more selective with what it lets in. I can spend hours studying for an art history exam, and it's all gone within the week. All while Bombardino Crocodilo, Tralalero Tralala, and Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung fucking Sahur get to live rent free up there for months.

ok but what actually is brainrot

In a more scientific sense, brainrot refers to the negative mental effects of today's media landscape—namely the gravitation toward short-form, addictive, low-effort content consumed in rapid succession. And it's pretty bad—an actual scientific article written in March 2025, Demystifying the New Dilemma of Brain Rot in the Digital Era: A Review, connects brainrot to things like "emotional desensitization, cognitive overload, and a negative self-concept...linked to psychological distress, anxiety, and depression." 

But if you've been alive these past few years, you know that already. And that same self-awareness is key to brainrot humor, a sort of aesthetic that's developed out of this doomscrolling, terminally-online-ing, mental-health-obliterating hellscape we've found ourselves in. It involves words and images that reference aspects of internet culture, often defined by their absurdity. To speak this language is to incorporate these words and images into your visual and verbal vocabulary. 

I agree with descriptions of brainrot humor as a coping mechanism. A way to make light of one's deteriorating state of mind, and to a degree, the deteriorating state of the world. The fact that it's limited to younger generations is no accident; brainrot humor's surreal and terminally-online sensibilities are tied to the surreal and terminally-online world we're born into. And part of its appeal is that while "those who know" find it funny, the rest of humanity can only look on in bewilderment. In a time where nothing makes sense—where people feel alienated and invisible in the "real" world, there's solace in this nonsensical world of our own creation. 

If you need an example, Italian brainrot has some pretty good ones. This "brand" of brainrot refers to a whole cast of AI-generated characters with silly-sounding Italian-esque names, and nonsensical Italian monologues that play in the background. These spawned a full-on epidemic of short-form-video content a few months back: people quizzing themselves on the names, AI-generated fights between the characters, and so on. 

On the surface, it's complete nonsense. But you can see the general idea at work: a big part of the humor is the nonsense. For me, there was quite a bit of "why-is-this-funny-what-is-wrong-with-me". There's the self-awareness, which of course is in itself a source of funny. And the fact that it wasn't just me—that there were countless others sharing in this experience of absurdity, is a big part of why this "works". To describe "Bombombini Gusini" as "relatable" might be a bit of a stretch, but somehow, it was an avenue of human connection: a reminder that in this post-modern, post-truth, post-information hellscape, there are others sharing in the nonsense.

brainrot and "art"

"Modern art" (or Contemporary Art, to be a bit more accurate) is a popular target of ridicule these days—things like those simple geometric paintings in museums, or stuff like this video i keep seeing—someone jumping with a marker and drawing lines on a wall. People call it low-effort. "My 6-year-old could draw that", they say. 

I'd argue brainrot is a very similar thing. It's "low-effort" and straight-up nonsense to most people. Anyone could make it. 

But, crucially, only some people actually do. 

Anyone could've submitted a urinal to an arts exhibition. But the fact that Marcel Duchamp actually did it means something. Anyone could have uh... done whatever the creative process behind Skibidi Toilet was. But the fact that uh... DaFuq!?Boom! actually did it; brought that abomination into the space of reality, means something. 

Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, is—yes—a urinal submitted to an arts exhibition. The absurdity of Fountain is core to its identity. The fact that a toilet should not be art is what makes it art; a challenge to the definitions and boundaries of the "artistic world". The controversy, confusion, and self-reflection it sparked is the point (I'm only scratching the surface of its nuance/significance, but that should be the gist of it)..

Skibidi Toilet and other adjacent pieces of brainrot inhabit a similar position in our media landscape. Its meaning derives from its lack of any. Its humor derives from its lack of qualifications to be funny. And the questions and confusion that arise from that disconnect are the point. 

(Brief acknowledgement: with people ridiculing Contemporary Art, the issue is just capitalism. Money is the measure of all things here, which doesn't work properly when it comes to art. Some things are judged as "low-effort", and people get understandingly upset when "low-effort" paintings gets sold for incredible incredible amounts of money. But the issue isn't the art, so much as that our value system just isn't compatible with it. There is a problem, but trying to gatekeep what is and isn't "real" or "meaningful" art is very much not the way to go.)

Art is human. Italian brainrot is human; our generation's unique, beautifully incomprehensible experience given form. 

Or so I would say. If it weren't for the elephant in the room. And it's not Lirili Larila, it's another highly unpredictable, potentially destructive elephant which may be granted free reign for the next 10 years.

hi fellow young people

Italian brainrot—the images of the creatures themselves, and most of the videos—are AI-generated. Which raises some pretty difficult questions, given the several paragraphs I just spent glazing it as an authentic form of human expression. 

A few days into Italian brainrot doomscrolling, there was something I came across that prompted a double-take. A Ryanair advertisement, with their own Italian brainrot creature, being used as a publicity stunt for their airline. 

Ew.

It surprised me at the time how mad that made me. Brands using memes in advertisements is nothing new, as a sort of "hello fellow young people, I too enjoy memes". And there it was: a corporation—this hulking inhuman thing of money and productivity, using AI—this hulking inhuman thing of efficiency and theft, to imitate our medium of connection for profit. One of those formless eldritch monstrosities, stealing the voices and faces of its prey, us, to lure them in. 

It brings me great joy that more often than not, these attempts are met with a resounding "nice try". 

But this was working. The Ryanair post was swimming in likes, positive comments; people tagging their friends. And looking at their page, they followed up with several similar posts. The monster had found a winning strategy. Its prey was flocking straight into its clutches.

but it's complicated of course it's complicated GOD why can nothing can ever be simpl-

I can say nothing about AI that hasn't already been said in more eloquent terms, but I'll try to summarize it. Conversations, memes, other forms of art; they're mediums of human expression and connection. Intentionally or not, they are stories: of our experiences, our decisions, and our effort. When we silently accept AI into this space, it poisons our basic ability to connect; a sort of inbreeding of the language we've built. 

As much as I think gatekeeping as a concept is stupid, this is a place where it's very necessary. There's something sacred about "localized" methods of communication, the verbal, physical, and memetic languages born from shared experiences and struggles within a community. AI is slop, and maybe brainrot is too. But it's our incoherent postmodern slop. It's as far away as you can get from the whole superficial say-nothing corporate aesthetic, a culture that transmutes "language" into "SEO"; "communities" into "target audiences"; "expression" into "content".

But as we're seeing, what if AI becomes a part of that language?

I don't know. Language develops according to some broad collective whim that nobody can predict, much less control. We might be entirely fine. I might be annoying-English-major-crashout-ing for nothing. But that Ryanair brainrot plane still lives rent-free in my head, and I want it gone. 

I don't like ending these with "calls-to-action". The point is to share my weird little thoughts, not to tell people what to do. But if I may, let's keep that reaction image from earlier handy. Treasure the things that make us human today, cause who knows where we'll be tomorrow.