A new viral dating show featuring sexy, cheating fruit has gone viral on TikTok, captivating audiences with its “Love Island” style format – but it also raises concerns about the increasing virality of ‘AI slop’ in the media.
Launched less than a month ago, “Fruit Love Island” is loosely based on the original reality show “Love Island”, where singles compete for love and money at a secluded villa.
Posted daily on TikTok by creator @ai.cinema012, it consists of one minute-long episodes featuring anthropomorphic fruits as they navigate dramatic love stories that involve cheating and other romantic complications.
The anonymous account has since garnered almost 3.3 million followers since they began posting these videos.
“Love Island” AI spinoff
Similar to “Love Island”, the fruit characters compete for a chance to couple up and stay on the island – often leading to arguments, break-ups, romances and even physical fights in each episode.
The short-form video series has also garnered various critiques, with many dismissing it as AI slop despite each episode receiving millions of views and likes on TikTok.
Some of the “Fruit Love Island” fans include celebrities such as Joe Jonas and Zara Larsson, as they’ve previously shared they have tuned in to the series.
“Sorry I can’t hang out today, I gotta see what’s happening with choclatina and strawberto,” Larsson wrote under a TikTok post, which she later deleted after backlash from fans.
“I’m worried about watermelina,” Jonas wrote in the comments of one of his TikTok videos.
Many fans are also driving engagement with the content, voting for their favourite couple who they want to see leave the island, and anticipating the next episode.
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AI slop
Amaya Espinal, the winner of “Love Island US” season 7 who was nicknamed “Amaya Papaya”, expressed her distaste at the AI fruit re-creation of the show she starred in last year.
“No I don’t watch Fruit Island, I would never watch Fruit Island,” Espinal said during a livestream.
“I don’t support it…That’s too crazy.”
She is not the only unimpressed viewer of “Fruit Love Island”, as some social media users and experts state that AI versions of popular shows are nothing but cheap entertainment preying on shortened attention spans, according to BBC.
Jessa Lingel, a digital culture and technology expert at the University of Southern California, told the BBC that the content is first and foremost “bad”.
“It’s pretty poor quality in the way we always see with AI slop,” Lingel said.
“The amount of work we’re supposed to put in as humans keeps getting shorter and shorter. Now you don’t even have to watch a whole episode of reality TV, you have a shortened, sensationalised AI slop version.”
“We’re using massive amounts of resources to create content that doesn’t actually have a message or isn’t pushing the conversation forward,” Lingel continued.
“There’s a role for AI that does important work, like preserving ancient languages or aiding in cancer research,” she said.
“But this AI is not that. This AI is just putting junk out there.”
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