The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: Humans Are in a Dance Battle With AI Babies
Your social media feed is probably showing you something totally different, but this week in young-people-land, Humanity is locked in a high-stakes dance battle with artificial intelligence, food is yelling at everyone, and we're learning a lot about "young hos."
Viral video of the week: human vs. AI baby dancingThis week's viral video is more of a viral video trend, and it involves a battle of dancing babies. It starts with the post below, from @mindalchemy0236, which I apologize for in advance.
An ad for the "Baby Dance" app, this video has been viewed over 100 million times. It became so overplayed on TiKTok that users fought back in the only way they could: Through dance. In a modern re-enactment of the American myth of John Henry vs. the Steam Engine, users on TikTok are locked in dance battle with AI. People responded to the annoying ad with videos of their human children doing the same dance for real, joking that it was to save $1.98, the app's price.
Kids got into it, throwing shade at AI at the same time.
Then grown-ups got in on it.
Grannies started doing it.
And celebrities like Lisa Rinna got into the act.
So it turned into a whole thing, and according to some users, human users ended up winning because TikTok's algorithm is showing more human remakes than the original ad that annoyed everyone. What does it all mean? Is this how the robot-human war will be decided? How does it relate to the original dancing baby, one of our first internet memes? Is history turning back on itself and should we invest in Ally McBeal reruns? I just don't know, but for what it's worth, John Henry won the battle with the steam shovel, but the effort exhausted him and he died.
AI food yelling videos: brain rot that's good for youI'm always trying to find good things about artificial intelligence. So far I got:
But I'm adding videos of food yelling at people. This growing meme format involves asking AI to make videos of food angrily telling you how to properly and safely prepare and store it. They're entertaining, educational, and if one person remembers to throw away rice that's left out, it could save a life and be worth all that cooling water. Kids need to know all this junk and for some reason they like brain rot. Check out these meaty boys:
And these angry fellas:
I can't vouch for the accuracy of every food tip on the hashtag, but I watched a bunch of these videos and so far, they're solid.
What does "young ho" mean?I'm sure you know what both "ho" and "young" mean, but put them together and it becomes something else, both a reclamation of the word "ho" and an expression of youth-based solidarity. The trend started with mildly insulting, older-people-bag-on-youngins posts on X like this one:
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But over on TikTok, @kensdremgurl went viral by laying down a mini-manifesto for young hos:
Summing up the list with, "all a young ho is is someone who's freed themself from being inconvenienced." Other TikTokers started listing which young ho traits they share:
They also started making their own observations, adding these traits to the list: