From a Seed to a Forest In a Digital Dump
A seed turning into a sapling, then a tree and a forest… No I won’t be talking about botany in this article :) The metaphoric association actually came out while thinking about the concepts of "brain-rot" and "AI slop" to me.
Our cycle starts right here with "seeds", meaningless content that goes viral like a soap bubble. After the reverberations when Oxford University Press chose "brain-rot" as the word of the year in 2024, I wonder how they can top it in 2025. I am sure that Henry David Thoreau could not even imagine what we are experiencing today when he first used the word brain-rot in his book written in 1854.
"AI slop" is a newer concept. It describes sloppy and empty videos produced by artificial intelligence. I describe them as the fast-food of the internet. Instant gratification, no nutritional value, harmful to eat over the long term. You're probably one of the millions of people who have watched videos of a kangaroo trying to board on a plane or the rabbits jumping on a trampoline.
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On platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, which are heavily used by Gen Z and Gen Alpha, meaningless content has increased to such an extent that "skibidi" means meaningless and "Ohio" now means awkward after viral memes and videos. In this way, content that is talked about for more than a few days, that introduces new words into our lives, and whose visibility continues to increase, turns into "saplings". Like the absurd hybrid characters of the Italian brain-rot series that emerged in early 2025, created with names that have nothing to do with the Italian language ( Yes we got up to this point after the depiction of Jesus with a shrimp body spread on Facebook in 2024).
While such videos may seem like fun snacks, the reality is different and the level of absurdity increases the deeper you go. Nine of the one hundred fastest growing channels on YouTube are AI-created. Productive AI tools are being used exactly as the algorithms want them to be used, producing absurd and violent content at a rapid rate "by the rules of the game". Examples include "cheap-fake" videos that try to go viral only by generating anger and reaction. The interactions feed these contents which transforms them from a sapling into a "tree" by taking root.
The risk is that AI slop videos become a permanent component, a "forest", with an unstoppable rise in the social media algorithm. While these videos take on a different meaning in the eyes of those who cannot distinguish between reality and fiction, some of the videos I watched before writing this article affected me as much as the awful series that are "still" on mainstream TV channels.
My main purpose of writing this article is about the role I see for myself in the formation of "ecosystems" that are one step further from the forest. I'm trying to plant a seed in everyone's minds by planting a seed in this digital dump, producing quality content and spreading it, even though it may be thought to be too idealistic. It is up to you to nurture and grow it in your mind and plant new seeds in the minds of others, so that we are not all exposed to brain-rot in a few years.