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Italian Brainrot: how to create it in ChatGPT, risks, and the impact of artificial intelligence on memes and pop culture

Italian Brainrot: jak zrobić w Chat GPT, zagrożenia, wpływ sztucznej inteligencji na memy i pop kulturę

Strange memes that seem to make no sense at first glance have been gaining popularity for several months. The trend in question is Italian Brainrot — a phenomenon characterized by the presence of surreal characters, often hybrids of animals and technology. Each of them has an Italian-sounding name, such as Bombardiro Crocodilo.

In the rest of the article, I will show how to create this type of meme using ChatGPT and other AI-powered tools. However, I encourage you to read the entire article, as this phenomenon also entails certain risks—particularly in the context of problems with concentration, the way social media algorithms work, and its overall impact on attention.

Funny images alone, such as a shark wearing Adidas shoes, are not a major problem—as long as we do not spend several hours a day looking at them and can still focus, for example, on reading a book.

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Table of contents

Brainrot and Italian Brainrot – an introduction to the topic

Brain rot – from the English “brain rot,” refers to content that makes no sense; it is simple entertainment intended to “switch off.” The name itself is ironic and dramatized.

Brainrot is a broad term used to describe the general decline in the quality of content, public debate, statements, or advertisements. It is often used to describe “TikTok-style” memes—overstimulating ones whose aim is to retain users’ attention for as long as possible.

History of the Term

According to information provided by Oxford University Press, the first known use of this term comes from Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, published in 1854. Thoreau used it to criticize what he saw as a decline in intellectual standards and the fact that complex ideas were ceasing to be valued. He compared this to the “potato blight” that afflicted Europe in the 1840s.

In the context of the internet, the expression appeared as early as 2004. Three years later, in 2007, Twitter users began using the term “brain rot” in reference to dating shows, computer games, and spending time online. In the following years, particularly during the 2010s, the phrase steadily grew in popularity on the internet, until it experienced a sharp rise in 2020 on Discord, where it became an internet meme.

What is brain rot?

“Brain rot” (literally “brain decay”) is an internet term for content that has no educational or artistic value, yet completely absorbs our attention. This phenomenon is familiar to anyone who has spent an hour watching meaningless videos on TikTok or couldn’t stop humming Skibidi Toilet.

Although the term itself has existed online since at least 2007, the true boom in “brain-rotting” content came between 2010 and 2020. Memes, repetitive sounds, absurd animations, and viral videos became a new form of addictive entertainment—so devoid of meaning that they are impossible to erase from memory.

Nowadays, “brain rot” is not only a critical term for worthless content, but also an ironic way of expressing an addiction to a particular fandom, game, or meme. If someone writes “Harry Potter brain rot continues” or “my brain rot is Steven Universe now,” it’s a sign that a particular obsession has completely consumed them.

Why am I discussing the topic of Italian Brainrot?

Italian Brainrot is not merely an internet curiosity—it is a phenomenon that perfectly illustrates how the creation and reception of content are changing in the era of artificial intelligence. These memes are the result of the easy availability of AI tools for generating images and sounds, while also reflecting new forms of expression in which absurdity, chaos, and form often prevail over content. It is worth discussing because, although the trend may seem completely nonsensical, it carries an important message: the younger generation is increasingly communicating through images, rhythm, and emotion rather than linear narratives.

Some argue that this type of content can lead to superficial communication, overstimulation, or even addiction to short, intense stimuli. That is true—in excess, even the most innocent trend can have a negative impact. But in itself, Italian Brainrot is not a harmful phenomenon. As long as it is approached with perspective and awareness, it can be a funny, creative, and at times surprisingly insightful commentary on pop culture, religion, and artificial intelligence. That is why it is worth understanding where it came from and what it says about contemporary internet culture—because it is not just a meme, but also a mirror of our digital times.

What Is Italian Brainrot?

In the first months of 2025, TikTok was taken over by the viral trend Italian Brainrot, also known as AI Italian Animals. It is a series of memes featuring AI-generated animals with absurd characteristics—such as sharks in shoes, elephants with flippers, or crocodiles in the form of bombers—narrated by a male Italian AI voice rhyming nonsensical phrases.

The trend was started by the video “Tralalero Tralala”, posted in January by the user @eZburger401. It featured a shark wearing Nike shoes and a grotesque story about Fortnite, religion, and a grandmother. Excerpt from the narration:

“Tralalero Tralala, Goddamn Good and godd All…”

Although the account was banned, the sound went viral. Just a few days later, a new version of the video featuring a shark in blue Nikes reached over 17 million views, sparking a wave of equally surreal characters.

Analyzing the Italian Brainrot Phenomenon: When Absurdity Meets Artificial Intelligence

Italian Brainrot is one of those internet phenomena that are difficult to describe and even harder to ignore. This trend, which began on TikTok at the start of 2025, quickly took over users’ feeds around the world. But what exactly makes this format—seemingly nonsensical and aesthetically “low-quality”—so immensely popular?

What Is Italian Brainrot Made Of?

At first glance, Italian Brainrot is simply a series of bizarre AI memes — but a specific structure lies behind the success of this trend. Every video or image follows a set pattern.

First, the image. Generated by artificial intelligence, it usually depicts an animal combined with some object—for example, a crocodile with a bomber fuselage, an elephant made of a cactus with flippers, or a frog with a tire and human legs. These are often hybrids that are surprising not only visually but also conceptually—crossing the boundaries of familiar categories, which in the psychology of memes increases their memorability.

The second element is an AI voice that speaks Italian with distinct expressiveness and linguistic errors. It is so-called text-to-speech, deliberately sounding “mechanical” and excessively theatrical. The language is mixed—Italian alternates with English profanities, religious allusions, and incoherent insertions, often related to pop culture.

The third ingredient is rhymes. The characters have names that are mini-poems in themselves—like Bombardiro Crocodilo, Lirili Larila, or Brr Brr Patapim. They sound like spells from a children’s fairy tale passed through a hallucinatory filter.

Finally, we have the narrative layer: strange, rhyming stories without a logical progression. They often contain random references to Religion, grandmother, Fortnite, or football. Pop-cultural absurdity is one of the strongest pillars of this aesthetic.

Why Such Popularity?

The phenomenon of Italian “brainrot” memes lies in their complete detachment from logic, evoking surprise, laughter, and fascination. They are like a digital equivalent of Dadaism—an art of nonsense that nonetheless attracts attention and cannot be ignored.

You don’t need to understand the language or the context. What matters is the form, absurdity, rhythm, and imagery. That’s enough to make a meme go viral.

Direct Precursors to Italian Brain Rot Memes

Wojak Brailet, skibidi

Between 2020 and 2024, Wojak memes gained significant popularity, one offshoot of which was the “brainlet Wojak” versions, used to describe someone’s stupidity. Although, as a rule, Wojak memes belong to a different meme family than Italian Brainrot, the abstract brainlets were a source of inspiration and certainly influenced the creation of the name Italian Brainrot.

Although “Skibidi Toilet” achieved a much larger reach—a meme in which a head emerging from a toilet sings songs—watching a single video from the series sounds absurd. Paradoxically, however, its creator deserves recognition, because the subsequent videos are not iterations of the same thing: they depict an arms race between the “Skibidi” and the “camera people.” In other words, if the “Skibidi toilets” were replaced with other characters, many people would have no trouble considering it quite good science fiction.

Risks and Problems with Receiving Italian Brainrot Content

Although Italian Brainrot may seem like harmless, absurd fun, it is worth noting that this type of content is part of a broader problem associated with the digital lifestyle – the growing difficulty of maintaining focus and the decline of deeper engagement with content. Brainrot memes are short, intense, overloaded with stimuli, and often devoid of logical meaning. They are designed to grab attention instantly and be replaced just as quickly by the next clip.

As a result, users—especially younger ones—may gradually lose patience with longer forms that require reflection or concentration. Brainrot memes reinforce the habit of jumping between pieces of content, fostering dependence on a constant dopamine hit. Overstimulation, the oversimplification of messages, and superficiality are real risks, especially when the trend stops being a joke and becomes the dominant way of consuming content.

It is therefore worth maintaining a balance—laughing at a shark in Nikes, but also knowing when to put down your phone and reach for something that requires more than five seconds of attention.

What is AI slop (Facebook)

The proliferation of AI-powered image-generation tools has led to the emergence of the AI slop phenomenon. In English, the word “slop” means mush or mixed food scraps. The term “AI slop” refers disparagingly to:

  • and often aim merely to flood the internet with “quantity” — e.g. for SEO, reach, profit, or clickbait.
  • mass-produced, bland content generated by artificial intelligence (e.g. boring articles, meaningless images, tacky products, etc.),
  • which is low-quality, repetitive, detached from context, and lacking in substantive or aesthetic value

AI slop is also a broad concept. However, in the context of brainrot memes, the key element is primarily the images posted on Facebook. In the West, as well as in Poland, Facebook is the social media platform with the highest average user age. Most seniors are on Facebook.

Let’s add to this the fact that Facebook is, by design, “the most authentic platform”—that is, we generally assume that the users there are real people (Facebook encourages the use of first and last names), rather than creators, as is the case, for example, with TikTok or YouTube.

This led to an influx of AI-generated images that were perceived as real by many users, mainly older people.

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Using artificial intelligence, you can generate interesting things—especially when someone has an interesting idea or during conceptual work. If we know that something was generated by AI and it impresses us, there is nothing wrong with that.

There are many graphics and short videos based on the idea that they were created by artificial intelligence. Popular series include, for example, countries as warriors, animal hybrids, or, somewhat more ambitiously, illustrations showing what a modern film (e.g., Harry Potter) would look like if it had been shot in, for instance, the 1960s.

However, the problem arises when someone likes such a photo, thinking that it is real.

AI slop

In this case, although it is a negative phenomenon, its harmfulness is relatively low. Facebook was simply flooded with low-quality images for a while. However, the fact that many older people do not know that anyone can generate such images can be exploited in a much worse way, for example to spread false information or commit financial fraud.

Currently, Polish Facebook is experiencing a wave of fake posts that look roughly like this: “An older couple, after running a shop for 30 years, decides to close it and sells off its entire stock at a large discount.” Sometimes, cheap Chinese knockoffs are sold this way at the price of handcrafted goods; sometimes, no product is shipped at all. Such scams have existed for many years, but the development of artificial intelligence has made them significantly easier to create.

So, if you’re reading this, warn your grandmother, grandfather, and parents. And if you can’t do it right now, remember (or write it down somewhere) to do so.

How to Make Italian Brainrot-Style Memes in ChatGPT?

The simplest way is to paste a selected graphic (e.g., Tralalili Tralala) into the chat and ask it to create something similar. The second way is to ask for abstract combinations of animals and technology to be generated. The rest depends on our imagination.

An important point: at this moment, ChatGPT does not “understand” what Italian brain rot is. This trend emerged at the beginning of 2025, while ChatGPT was trained on older data. Therefore, if we ask it to generate an image in the “Brain rot” style, we will literally receive a graphic depicting a rotting brain. The same applies when we ask for graphics of specific characters from the Brainrot universe. So, if we want to obtain other versions of the “Asasino Capuchino” graphic, the simplest solution is simply to paste the graphic into ChatGPT.

We can write the prompt text in Polish, but we will often achieve a better result by writing it in English.

Method 1: using a ready-made brainrot-style graphic to generate others.

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Method 2: generating a graphic from scratch.

Prompt used: Create an image—an absurd combination of an animal with technology and everyday objects, in a 3D animation render style, meme-like.

This simple text creates a random animal for us. It is also very easy to obtain the Italian name.

Testudino Keypad

This is how we obtained our first Brainrot. It looks like a brainrot, but it needs some refinement. However, the resulting image is a good source of inspiration.

Its main problem: too many elements. When designing characters (not just brainrots—this applies to all cartoon characters, game characters, etc.), we follow the principle that less is more.

Of course, not all brainrots are a combination of an animal and technology. Sometimes they are everyday objects on their own, e.g. Adidas shoes with a shark (in such a case, using the word technology makes ChatGPT “think” of computers, electronic equipment, etc.).

Italian brairot at an early stage of development

Sometimes brainrot is a combination of different animals, animals with plants, etc.

So the general formula for a prompt is: Create an image + an absurd combination + a description of the combination [first category (e.g., animal)] + [second category (plant)] + 3D animation render style

How to Simplify Character Design? The “Less Is More” Principle in Practice

When designing a character—whether for a game, meme, cartoon, or graphic for a project such as Brainrot—it is worth following one basic principle: less is more.

Focus on one key element

Many beginners make the same mistake: they try to convey too much at once. They add more details, thinking that each one enriches the character and tells its story. As a result, however, an overload of information is created that, instead of helping, becomes distracting. The audience will not remember anything specific if there is nothing for their eyes to “latch onto.”

Therefore, it is worth focusing on one dominant symbol: it could be a weapon, a distinctive object, or a piece of equipment. Something that unmistakably identifies the character. The rest—if needed at all—should merely complement this motif.

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Pop Culture Examples

Let’s see how the creators at Marvel do it:

  • Thor – he has a hammer. He may wear a helmet, but it is the hammer that you remember.
  • Captain America – his symbol is a shield. One association, one weapon.
  • Iron Man – a more complex character, but the focus still remains on his armor and the way he shoots from his hands. Note that other weapons, such as a flamethrower, lasers, and rocket launchers, are secondary.
  • Thanos – although he possesses many items and weapons (such as a sword), we remember him through the prism of the gauntlet.

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Each of these characters has its own additional elements, but everything revolves around one thing that makes them recognizable.

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Let’s transfer this to our graphic

The current graphic features a turtle and… a lot of extras: coffee, various objects, and a scene in the background. All of this needs to be simplified. Keep the turtle. If it’s wearing headphones, that’s fine, but they should be visible and make sense. If it has a keyboard, perhaps it would be worth integrating it into its shell? There are many possibilities, but the key is to avoid distracting the viewer.

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Iterative – many versions, many revisions, testing.

Design is a process. Create several versions of the creature. Test different combinations of elements. Check which prompts generate interesting effects. Learn what works well and what creates chaos.

Sometimes it’s worth starting from scratch—a completely new prompt, a new context. Or uploading an image in a different thread, without any “history.” This allows you to look at things with fresh eyes and discover new possibilities.

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Where to Get Ideas?

Creativity and imagination.

It’s best to come up with them from scratch. This way, inventing new brainrot characters develops our creativity. Some people can naturally create such images in their minds, but it’s a skill that can be trained. Drawing is helpful here (by hand—using a tablet or computer is also fine, but it’s best to do it on paper). Especially since nowadays, with the help of AI, you can easily “bring your drawings to life.”

Another way is to listen to stories with your eyes closed and imagine them. There are many techniques; often, imagining a flat screen (or canvas) also works, which is easy for visual thinkers, and then projecting whatever we want to imagine onto it.

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Observation of the surroundings, images (especially surrealist ones)

Often, the inspiration for creating a brainroot can be an object. For example, a tree with an interesting shape, a stone, or even a trash can.

Paintings are also a very good source of inspiration, especially surrealist ones, such as those by Salvador Dalí. Symbolism is also very interesting, as is the late Gothic and early Renaissance Netherlandish art of Hieronymus Bosch, who can be called a precursor of Surrealism.

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Idea List Prompt

Text generation is much faster than image generation. It is therefore easy to generate a list of a dozen or even several dozen ideas, and then select the best versions.

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Modifying Familiar Images in the Italian Brainrot Style

The simplest way is just to paste a familiar graphic and ask for modifications.

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Italian Brainlet – how to create an animation.

If we want to create animations from an image in ChatGPT, we need to have a paid version of the program that provides access to the Sora model.

If we do not have such a version, we can use Google AI Studio.

When Did Italian Brainrot Originate?

The Beginning of the Phenomenon: Tralalero Tralala

The combination of the previously mentioned brain rot memes and absurd memes with artificial intelligence enabled the creation of Italian Brainrot memes.

As the Know Your Meme website explains:

It all began in January 2025 on TikTok. At that time, a video appeared featuring a shark wearing Nike shoes, accompanied by a male Italian voice generated by a speech synthesizer, rhythmically uttering absurd phrases: “Tralalero Tralala, Goddamn [..], I was with my damn kid, […] playing Fortnite, when at one point my grandma comes in.”

I was with my kid, darn it, playing Fortnite when suddenly my grandma walks in.

The user @eZburger401 was responsible for the material; their account was later banned, but the meme did not disappear—it was picked up and transformed by other creators.

As early as January 8, 2025, user @elchino1246 published a video featuring the same sound, depicting a shark with pigeon legs standing on land. Although the video received “only” 19,000 views and 422 likes over three months, it marked the beginning of a larger trend.

Just a few days later, on January 13, 2025, TikToker @amoamimandy.1a posted another video featuring a shark wearing blue Nike shoes. This time, its popularity exploded—the video garnered over 17 million views and one million likes within three months.

The Rise of the Trend: Bombardiro Crocodilo, Lirili Larila, and Others

Following the success of Tralalero Tralala, the internet was flooded with a wave of increasingly absurd AI-generated creatures. They all had one thing in common: unrealistic combinations of animals with objects or characteristics that make no sense, but work perfectly as “brainrot content”—something so strange and detached from reality that it is hard to stop watching.

The most popular of them are:

  • Bombardiro Crocodilo — a military bomber with a crocodile’s head, flying through the sky with a roar and teeth on its nose. It is currently the main symbol of Brainrot memes because, unlike Tralalalero Tralala, its name works better on the imagination and already suggests something,
  • Lirili Larila — a cactus-elephant in flippers, marching through the desert.
  • Brr Brr Patapim — another absurd creature that gained significant popularity in the following months.

All these characters were presented in the same format: bizarre graphics, an Italian voice-over, rhyming, nonsensical text, and often references to pop culture, religion, or everyday life.

Growing Popularity and Expansion Beyond Italy

Over time, these memes stopped being exclusively “Italian.” Local versions of the trend began appearing in other countries. Indonesian spin-offs, such as the following, gained particular popularity:

  • Tung Tung Tung Sahur
  • Hotspot Bro
  • Boneca Ambalabu

This shows that the formula was universal — an absurd character + a synthesizer voice + rhythmic text = viral success.

Ranking and Meme Explosion

On March 14, 2025, TikTok user @tjantv published a ranking of all the best-known Italian memes of this type. The post garnered over 7 million views and 620,000 likes in just five days, further confirming that we are dealing with a global internet culture phenomenon.

Internet Access from Birth + Artificial Intelligence .

It’s not that the new generation is “weird” or “broken.” Waves of memes similar to Italian Brainrot have appeared repeatedly over the past dozen or so years. They usually had a smaller reach and remained within internet subcultures. Absurdist content, however, existed much earlier—in various forms, it had already been present in culture for over 80, and even 150, years. With a little creativity, one can trace the roots of contemporary brainrot even to ancient literature or the Dadaist manifestos of the 20th century.

What distinguishes the current meme trend is the fact that it is created by people for whom the internet is not something new, but a natural environment—a reality they have been connected with since birth.

The generation born in the 1990s gained access to the internet only as teenagers. For them, it was a technological novelty. The generation born in the 2000s theoretically had access to the internet from birth, but in practice, it was limited—young children could use a computer for only a dozen or so minutes a week, usually under adult supervision. The devices were not very user-friendly: CRT monitors, unintuitive operating systems, slow browsers, and websites loaded via modem.

Meanwhile, people born after 2010 are literally born with the internet in their hands. Even two- and three-year-olds can independently operate a tablet, choose cartoons, or play mobile games. Children born in 2010 are now 15 years old — fully-fledged content creators. Those born in 2015 are already 10 and entering an age when they begin to actively participate in digital life — not only as consumers, but also as creators of memes, trends, and aesthetics. It is from this generation that the Italian Brainrot trend and similar phenomena have emerged — completely unnatural to older audiences, but perfectly logical to those who discovered the world through a screen.

In the next part of the article, I will discuss the main meme-cultural-artistic trends, apart from the aforementioned Wojaks, brainlets, and the Skibidi trend, which are surprisingly similar to Italian brainrot.

Earlier Waves of Absurdist Movements

Top Tier with Broken Spanish (numero uno, honorable mention)

A meme ranking format based on arranging everything—from beverages to cartoon characters—into a hierarchy from “S” to “F.” Often used ironically, with exaggerated commentary. Particularly popular on YouTube and TikTok. In this context, videos featuring a Spanish-sounding, automatically generated voice are especially relevant. This series is responsible for choosing the voice for memes from the Italian brainlet series.

Polsich dancing Cow and other rotating models

Absurd 3D animations, often of low quality (e.g. dancing cows, video game characters), spinning to the rhythm of electronic music, phonk, or remixes. Pure visual absurdity without a narrative, hypnotic and amusing. The song’s sadly funny aspect fit perfectly with the dull COVID era.

Despacito Exposito Dame tu Cosito

A verbal and visual pun combining memes surrounding the song “i dame tu cosito.” It is based on phonetics and cultural confusion, often paired with strange imagery.

Wojak (Brainlet)

A character drawn with simplified lines, symbolizing stereotypical behaviors and different ways of thinking. Brainlet is a small-brained variation that contrasts with Galaxy Brain. These memes mock ideas, narratives, and types of people, often in a pseudo-intellectual style.

Skibidi

A surreal TikTok series in which heads emerging from toilets sing and fight to the rhythm of “Dom Dom Yes Yes.” Although seemingly nonsensical, it has garnered millions of views and developed into an entire “Skibidi lore.” Popular among the youngest audiences.

Dank memes

What Are Dank Memes?

Dank Memes is an ironic term for viral online content—most often memes—that is deliberately absurd, bizarre, exaggerated, or worn out to the point of exhaustion, until it becomes funny again. The word “dank,” which originates from slang for high-quality marijuana, is used sarcastically in this context as a synonym for “cool.”

Origins and Development

  • The term appeared around 2014, probably on 4chan, Reddit, or within the montage parody community on YouTube.
  • One of the first popular examples was a series of “how to make dank memes” parodies, as well as memes commenting on their own “dankness” (e.g., “born just in time to watch dank memes”).
  • Since then, the expression has spread across the internet as a meta-joke, often parodying meme culture itself.

Cultural Significance

Dank Memes represent a reaction to the mainstream, content overload, and the decline in the quality of internet humor. Like Brainrot or AI slop, they are often a satirical commentary on pop culture and the mass production of content.

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Spicy Memes is a variant of “dank” memes—used as a comparison for “even more intense” and more exaggerated content. The term gained popularity in 2015 on Facebook, Reddit, and Tumblr.

Deep-Fried Memes

Deep-fried memes are a specific genre of memes that look as though someone has repeatedly run them through a graphics editor, compressing and distorting the image to the limits of absurdity. They are characterized by oversaturated colors, distortions, JPEG artifacts, glaring lighting effects, and bold fonts, often in the Impact style. The effect is intentionally exaggerated—the image looks “fried,” hence deep-fried.

The trend began around 2015 on Instagram, Reddit, and in shitposting groups. These memes are a form of parody of the meme format itself—their exaggerated form and often absurd content become a comedic response to the predictability of typical internet humor. Sometimes they rely on nonsense, sometimes on surprise, and sometimes solely on visual form.

Fleck

Deep-fried memes are closely associated with the aesthetics of irony and post-irony, and their power lies not so much in the content itself as in the way it is presented. It is somewhat like internet Dadaism—deliberately chaotic and incomprehensible, yet precisely for that reason appealing to audiences tired of classic, “polite” memes. Although their popularity has declined, their influence on internet humor is still evident.

Example analysis of a deep-fried meme

The image shows a blurred face of Shrek with the text “WHEN YOU MICROWAVE THE MICROWAVE” in a bright font. The background is a repeating lens flare, and the whole image is saturated to an almost fluorescent level.

This meme makes no logical sense—but it is so heavily edited that its absurdity becomes… funny. The exaggeration is an intentional parody of classic internet humor.

Why do people like them?

  • Community inside jokes – often understandable only to users in the know.
  • A reaction to weariness with classic memes – they are more “chaotic” and therefore less predictable.
  • The culture of irony and post-irony – deep-fried memes function as a commentary on the state of memes and the internet.

Surreal Memes

Surreal memes are a subgenre of ironic memes that have gained popularity since 2015 thanks to their absurd aesthetic and multilayered humor. Their distinguishing features include distorted 3D characters, such as Meme Man and Mr. Orange, excessively processed graphics (the so-called deep-fried images), and nonsensical language such as “TRIGGERRED” or “ANGERY”. Although they appear random at first glance, their humor is based on deliberately blurring the boundaries between meaning and meaninglessness, often commenting on internet culture itself.

Surreal memes began spreading mainly through Reddit (especially r/surrealmemes), Facebook, and Imgur. In 2017, their popularity surged, supported by explanatory videos on YouTube, such as those by Aztrosist. The key to understanding them lies in the so-called “layers of irony”—the more layers there are, the greater the effect of confusion and laughter.

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Cursed Memes: Cursed, Blessed, and Blursed

It all started with cursed memes — images so strange that it was hard to look away. Crooked mannequins, pasta stuck into an electrical outlet, faces in strange places. Unease, absurdity, and aesthetic suffering became a meme category. The internet loved them precisely because they were “not quite right.”

Cursed memes should not be confused with ordinary scary pictures, graphic images, or horror themes.

Not every frightening or disturbing image is a cursed image. There are things that we immediately know are uncomfortable or frightening, such as scenes from horror films, photos of accidents, etc. Such images should not be circulated in a humorous or entertainment context, especially where they may be encountered accidentally by people under the age of eighteen.

But this is not the essence of cursed memes.

Their nature is well captured by toast bread. It is not frightening when we see it on the table. But an entire bathroom lined with slices of toast bread causes much greater unease than might seem at first glance.

Then came blessed memes – a response to this chaos. What mattered here were positive emotions: a cat cuddling a pigeon, a cake shaped like a happy onion, or a kid helping a snail cross the sidewalk. These memes were like a warm blanket after a storm – the internet finally caught its breath.

But the most interesting things emerged at the intersection of these two worlds: blursed memes. Neither fully cursed nor entirely blessed—they’re both strange and adorable at the same time. These are images that resist easy classification. Like, for example, a snail wearing a tiny sheriff’s hat.

It is precisely blursed that capture the spirit of the modern internet quite well, especially in kon: funny, weird, and surprisingly… comforting.

Early YouTube

Long before the era of influencers, advertising, and algorithms fine-tuning content for SEO, YouTube was a digital playground. Its early years (2005–2012) were a time of chaos, creativity, and total freedom, when amateurs experimented with form and bizarre videos gained millions of views without any strategy. This was where memes, inside jokes, and the internet’s distinctive sense of humor were born.

The Great Mix and the Era of Absurd Clips

Many people remember legendary compilations such as “The Great YouTube Mix”—collages of absurd, often nonsensical video clips, loud sound effects, and cartoon snippets.

They had a similar atmosphere:

  • Badger Badger Badger – an animation created by Weebl in 2003 (later uploaded to YouTube), in which mushrooms, badgers, and snakes dance in an endless loop to hypnotic music. Total absurdity? Yes. And that’s exactly why it became iconic.
  • Annoying Orange – an orange with a realistic human face that screams at and annoys other fruits before they are peeled or cut open. Childish? Yes. But in 2010, it was a hit with its own TV series.
  • Filthy Frank – a persona created by George Miller (later known as Joji). This channel crossed every boundary of taste and political correctness, serving up sketches, songs, and happenings that balanced between genius and madness. The “Harlem Shake,” among other things, originated from this world.

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What Was Early YouTube?

These were not the days of aesthetic vlogs and planned content. Early YouTube was:

  • wild – anyone could upload anything;
  • creative – from zero to viral with no budget;
  • absurd – the stranger, the better;
  • nonchalant – it wasn’t about making money, but about having fun.

It was a culture of memes born organically, not content marketing. YouTube back then resembled a digital basement full of VHS tapes—packed with oddities that would be difficult to get past moderation today.

Early YouTube was a place where the internet was truly itself—unpredictable, imperfect, but full of freshness. And that is precisely why we remember it so fondly today.

Cyriak – master of psychedelic absurdity

Cyriak Harris, known simply as Cyriak, is a British animator, musician, and graphic artist who gained internet fame through his surreal, often unsettling animations published on YouTube. His style is immediately recognizable: mutating cows, many-armed cats, multiplying limbs, logical loops of absurdity, and surprisingly polished choreography of chaos.

A Style That Cannot Be Mistaken for Anything Else

Cyriak creates using Adobe After Effects, building animations based on loops, transformations, and endless multiplication. Images that initially seem innocent—a cat, a walking cow, a human face—begin to distort, duplicate, grow, writhe, mutate… until they fill the entire screen in a grotesque, rhythmic dance.

All of this is synchronized with the electronic music he composes himself—often straddling the boundaries of IDM, techno, and ambient. These are not typical animations—they are drug-induced visions that hypnotize and slightly terrify.

The Most Famous Works

  • “Baaa” – an animation about sheep that begin creating a pulsating, living system. Cute and terrifying at the same time.
  • “Cyriak’s Animation Mix” – the perfect introduction to his style. Everything moves, everything multiplies, nothing makes sense, but you can’t look away.
  • “Meow Mix” – cats doing things you never wanted to see—and can’t unsee.
  • Intro to “Rick and Morty” (season 4 special episode) – Cyriak also had the chance to mutate this world, and he did it in his own style—with dense, slimy inventiveness.

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Who is he and where did he come from?

Cyriak is a computer graphic artist by training. Initially, he created GIFs and experimented with animation as a form of expression. The internet quickly fell in love with his style—before surrealism became fashionable. Although his work balances on the boundary between the grotesque and the nightmarish, it is exceptionally technically refined and always precise in its deformation.

How Does Cyriak Work?

Cyriak takes what is familiar—animals, faces, everyday objects—and transforms it into something alien. It plays with the human brain: you recognize the form, but its behavior breaks the rules of physics, logic, and aesthetics. The result? Unease mixed with fascination.

Cyriak is not just an animator. He is an internet illusionist. He takes simple images and transforms them into dancing, pulsating monstrosities. And instead of running away, you keep watching—for it is the strangest beauty you have ever seen.

The Side Stream: Internet Surrealism and Psychedelia (with Artistic Roots)

When mentioning memes, we cannot forget about works that were not created as memes (but were later “memed”). A good example is Kraina Grzybów TV.

Mushroom Kingdom TV

Kraina Grzybów TV is one of the most enigmatic artistic projects on the Polish internet. It began as a YouTube channel, but quickly evolved into a fully fledged artistic universe that balances educational parody with cinematic nightmare. Its creator, Wiktor Stribog, remained anonymous for years, and his series “A Guide to Smiling” became a cult classic not only in Poland but abroad as well.

Smile Guide

The central element of Kraina Grzybów is the series “Smile Guide”, styled after educational VHS programs from the Polish People’s Republic. It is hosted by Agatka—a girl trapped in a strange, dreamlike yet unsettling reality, supported by the cartoon squirrel Małgosia (or perhaps rather her dark alter ego, Teufel). Every so often, Agatka’s mother interrupts them, trying to reconstruct her daughter’s mysterious past.

There is no single coherent plot here—everything is fragmentary, as if assembled from random tapes. Alongside Agatka, we encounter Karolinka, Justynka, Hatshepsut from Bytom, and the enigmatic Denim Man. The episodes alternate with propaganda films from the USA and the USSR, medical advice, cooking, and surreal symbolism.

The Aesthetics of Nostalgia and Unease (Hauntology)

“Smile Guide” is a textbook example of hauntology—the art inspired by a past that never happened. It uses a retro atmosphere, chaotic animations, illegible messages, grating sound, and language devoid of logic. Instead of explaining, it asks questions. Instead of teaching, it hypnotizes.

The format resembles a video creepypasta. The content is both childish and terrifying. The first episode, “How to Effectively Apple,” was uploaded to YouTube on December 23, 2013. Since then, five full episodes have appeared, of which the third… does not exist. Instead, the music video “Mushroom Melodies” was published, in which Karolinka sings “Ballad in the Rhythm of Denim.”

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Mystery and the Mind Virus

The success of Kraina Grzybów was no coincidence. Stribog—a researcher of internet culture—created it like a virus. He built suspense without revealing who was behind the project. No one knew who played Agatka. No one knew the project’s purpose. Even Zofia Kopytlanka’s “book,” whose quotations appeared in the episodes, turned out to be fictional.

Everything was meant to provoke unease, draw the audience in, and blur reality with fiction. The author ran the Ghostovich blog, where he announced the premiere without revealing anything directly. It was only in 2017—during the end credits—that we learned who the creators were.

A Finale Without a Finale

The Mushroom Land ended the same way it had unfolded—with mystery. The third episode of “The Smile Guide” was never made because… its files went missing. The plot was never explained, and no answers were ever given.

But perhaps that was precisely the point? For the questions to remain unanswered. For us to continue wondering whether Agatka really existed. And whether, perhaps, we are smiling… just as we were taught.

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How Does Jamniczek Work? A Film from 1971 (from Before the Internet Was Created)

“How the Dachshund Works” is a cult classic short animated film by Julian Antonisz from 1971. This eight-minute film is a showcase of imagination and non-camera technique—the image is created without using a camera, drawn and scratched directly onto film stock.

What is this about?

The narrator—a ninety-year-old nursing home resident with a Borderlands accent—explains how a dachshund’s body works. What initially appears to be an educational lecture quickly turns into a surreal story about a biomechanical machine. The climax comes with the appearance of Ewaryst, who… crushes the dachshund. Screws and gears spill out from inside. The narrator concludes: “Let’s not destroy the little dachshund.”

Humor, Ecology, and the Mechanics of Absurdity

The film combines nonsensical humor with a surprising ecological message. It is a story about the fragility of life—told through the prism of absurd “technical anatomy.” With a tongue-in-cheek approach, Antonisz juxtaposes the Cartesian view of the animal with the need for empathy and reflection.

Heritage

Although it was created over 50 years ago, “Jamniczek” still surprises audiences with its form and content. It won awards at festivals, including those in Mannheim and Kraków, and gained a second life in the 21st century thanks to its popularity on platforms such as YouTube.

This is not an ordinary animation. It is an experiment, a manifesto, and charming absurdity all in one.

Abstract Art

Abstraction is one of the most groundbreaking movements in the history of art—a radical break with the tradition of depicting reality. At the beginning of the 20th century, artists decided to abandon realistic forms in favor of compositions based on color, line, rhythm, and emotion. A painting was no longer meant to “show” the world, but to act like music—purely emotionally, intuitively, and often entirely without reference to reality.

Within this movement, two main directions emerged: geometric abstraction (e.g. Mondrian, Malevich), focusing on simple shapes and harmony, and expressive abstraction (e.g. Kandinsky, Pollock), based on spontaneous gesture, energy, and emotion. Each of these artists experimented with composition, movement, and texture, and later also with light and digital techniques.

For many viewers, abstraction can be challenging—it does not provide a ready-made image or tell a story. But that is precisely where its strength lies: it opens up space for personal interpretation. It is art that you feel—you do not have to understand it to take something away from it.

Dadaism

Dadaism was one of the most rebellious movements in 20th-century art—it emerged as a reaction to the brutality of World War I, but quickly evolved into an outright rejection of logic, art, and social order. It was born in 1916 in Zurich, at the Cabaret Voltaire, and spread rapidly throughout Europe and the USA.

Dadaists rejected everything considered “normal” – instead of harmony and beauty, they embraced absurdity, chance, provocation, and chaos. Their works often looked like nonsense: newspaper collages, readymade objects (such as Duchamp’s urinal signed “Fountain”), and random words arranged into poems. What mattered was not the form, but the gesture of rebellion, the undermining of the very meaning of art.

Dadaism was also extremely experimental—it combined text, image, sound, and performance. Manifestos, stage performances, wordplay, and happenings became its hallmark. The aim was not to create something lasting, but to provoke shock, laughter, and dissent against a culture that, in the Dadaists’ view, had led to war.

Although Dadaism was a short-lived movement, its influence proved immense. It laid the foundations for Surrealism, conceptual art, performance art, and punk culture. It is an example of art that is not afraid to be absurd—for sometimes absurdity is the only appropriate response to the absurdity of the world.

Surrealism

Surrealism is an artistic movement that emerged from Dadaism in the 1920s, but instead of provocative chaos, it focused on exploring the subconscious, dreams, and irrational impulses. Its creators believed that true human freedom lies beyond the control of reason—in the world of imagination, fantasy, and automatic associations.

The inspiration for the Surrealists was Freudian psychoanalysis – dreams, sexuality, fears, and hidden desires became material for creating art. Artists used techniques of automatic writing and drawing, collages, photomontages, and hyperrealistic painting depicting completely unreal scenes.

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans – Salvador Dalí

The most famous surrealist artists are:

  • Salvador Dalí – with his soft watches, deserts, and paranoid-critical style of painting dreams,
  • René Magritte – master of paradoxes and visual puzzles (“This Is Not a Pipe”),
  • Max Ernst – experimenter with the techniques of frottage and decalcomania,
  • André Breton – author of the Surrealist Manifesto and the movement’s leading theorist.

Surrealism was not limited to painting—it also encompassed literature, film, photography, and even fashion. It aspired to transform the whole of life into a work of art, in which dreams mingle with waking reality and logic is replaced by imagination.

Today, surrealism continues to fascinate—as an art of freedom, rebellion against conventions, and the constant discovery of hidden layers of reality.

Still from the film “Un Chien Andalou,” directed by Luis Buñuel, with the screenplay written in collaboration with Salvador Dalí. Un Chien Andalou – poster

Dutch Art of the Late Gothic and Early Renaissance

Hieronymus Bosch is one of the most mysterious and fascinating painters in the history of art. He was born around 1450 in the Dutch city of ’s-Hertogenbosch (hence the nickname “Bosch”), at a time when Europe was transitioning from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Although he lived in a world filled with Gothic symbolism and religious narratives, his works were ahead of their time—both in form and content.

Between Gothic and Renaissance

Bosch worked during a period of transition: the Gothic style was giving way to the Renaissance. However, his paintings do not resemble the classical, harmonious compositions of the Italian Renaissance. Instead, Bosch depicted hellish visions filled with monsters, demons, bizarre creatures, and surprising symbols. Although he technically employed the styles of his era, his subject matter and manner of depiction were entirely new—disturbing, grotesque, and hypnotic.

Fantasy, Symbolism, and a Warning

His most famous work, The Garden of Earthly Delights, is a triptych filled with hidden meanings. The left panel depicts paradise, the center shows people immersed in sensual pleasures, and the right panel portrays hell, where they await their torment. Every detail has meaning: the fruits, creatures, instruments, and even the figures’ gestures. Bosch did not paint merely to delight—his paintings were moral warnings. He showed where sin, pride, gluttony, and promiscuity lead.

In those days, when the Bible was the primary source of knowledge about the world, Bosch’s paintings functioned as visual sermons. But they were not literal—they were full of enigmas, symbols, and absurdities. This is why art interpreters still debate their meaning today.

Precursor of Surrealism

Although Bosch created his works 400 years before the emergence of Surrealism, many 20th-century artists—including Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst—regarded him as their spiritual forefather. His visions did not stem from observing reality, but from imagination, dreams, fears, and religious meditations. He was one of the first to treat painting as a space for telling stories about the invisible and the irrational.

The Garden of Earthly Delights – detail

Misunderstood During His Lifetime?

It is not known exactly how his work was received by his contemporaries. On the one hand, he gained recognition and prestige—his patrons included, among others, nobles and members of the clergy. On the other hand, his style was so original and unsettling that over time he came to be associated more with magic than with religion. After his death, his paintings were regarded as oddities for centuries; it was only modern research that uncovered their depth and significance.

It’s surprisingly easy to turn details from Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings into Italian Brainrot-style memes

In conclusion: Hieronymus Bosch was a visionary painter ahead of his time. He combined religious didacticism with a fantastical imagination. He painted allegories of sin, temptation, and punishment, creating a style unlike any other—balancing Gothic, Renaissance, and what we would today call Surrealism. His paintings are not only works of art, but also riddles that continue to intrigue and inspire.

Italian Brain Rot – A Serious Analysis

In the age of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and endless scrolling, the internet has given rise to something that at first glance looks like a system error—but is actually its by-product. We’re talking about brainrot, the aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) of memes that make no sense. Or perhaps they do?

Chaos as a Form

Brainrot—literally “brain rot”—is a trend in online meme culture that breaks with the classic approach to humor. Instead of a punchline, there is randomness. Instead of wordplay—gibberish. Instead of finesse—parody and crudity. Often, the images are not even funny in the traditional sense. And that is precisely what makes them so appealing.

It is no coincidence that Brainrot graphics are “random.” Their power lies in the absurdity that makes no attempt to pretend to be anything deeper. Where a classic meme relies on structure and wit, Brainrot rejects the rules. There is no room for a “twist” or punchline—one image, a strange caption, and a grotesque JPG filter simulating repeated copying are enough. The result? Laughter, but more confused than prompted by a punchline.

The Grassroots Revolution of Stupidity

Contrary to appearances, Brainrot did not come out of nowhere. It is not the result of a corporate trend or algorithmic content planning. It emerged from the grassroots, as the internet community’s spontaneous reaction to the flood of generic, flat, profit-driven productions. In an era when every piece of social media content has to be “valuable,” “engaging,” and “monetizable,” Brainrot says: I don’t have to be any of those things.

It’s a bit like holding up the middle finger to the whole machine. Both the creator and the audience know it’s stupid. And that’s precisely why it works. There’s something sincere in this deliberate stupidity—something many professional productions lack.

AI slop and other plagiarism

Brainrot does not exist in a vacuum. Its popularity is also a reaction to other phenomena in contemporary visual culture—such as the aforementioned AI slop, meaning the mass generation of images by artificial intelligence without any artistic oversight. When algorithms create millions of generic “pretty” images, Brainrot prefers to be ugly. Consciously and deliberately.

The same applies to so-called “crappy corporate content” — material created to order, by the book, with SEO, reach, and targets in mind. Brainrot knows no targets. It knows no ideal audience. It knows no strategy. It knows only chaos.

The Evolution of Memes, the Deconstruction of Form

However, it should be noted that Brainrot is not some completely detached oddity. It is another stage in the evolution of memes, which has been ongoing since the early days of the internet. There were classic memes—with large text at the bottom and a picture of a cat. There were post- and alt-memes—with play on conventions, self-irony, and deconstruction. There were Dank memes, which sought to preserve a certain “elitism” of humor—accessible only to those in the know. In principle, it was not about elitism for its own sake. Excessive dissemination of a given meme caused it to become boring. One views a given meme differently when seeing it once a day than when it appears on the screen a hundred times a day. Overuse of a given meme caused it to “die,” and as a result, it was unable to develop interesting forms, which happened when the meme remained in use for a longer period of time.

Brainrot grows out of this tradition, but at the same time distorts it. Like the deliberate degradation of image quality (e.g. through repeated conversions to JPG), it contains an element of rebellious grotesque. It continues the spirit that has been saying for years: “Not everything has to be beautiful and meaningful in order to work.”

Memes as Information

It is worth recalling that a “meme” in its original sense (from before the internet) is information that replicates itself. It does not have to be an image. It can be text, a copypasta, a loud sound, or a single word. What matters is that it spreads—that it takes on a life of its own.

Brainrot fully meets this condition. It is a meme not only formally, but also functionally. Although often nonsensical, it is precisely its illogicality that makes it contagious. It is passed on because it is hard not to show it to someone else—not out of a need for laughter, but out of a need to share the absurdity.

Culture of Excess and the Reaction to Excess

One might venture the thesis that Brainrot does not so much entertain as cleanse. In times of excess, when we are bombarded with content pretending to be important, wise, and valuable, it offers something entirely opposite. It interrupts the information noise with laughter for no reason. It lets us stop and say: “That was stupid. And that’s good.”

Or perhaps it is precisely in this—paradoxically—that its meaning lies.

A Trail to Investigate – The Impact of COVID and Lockdown on the Creation of Italian Brainrot

Although Italian Brainrot only gained popularity in 2025, it is worth asking whether its aesthetics and form are not an echo of long-term cultural changes initiated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns caused an explosion of online creativity, increased interest in absurdist humor, and accelerated the adoption of AI tools in entertainment. Isolation, boredom, and overstimulation may have created fertile ground for meme formats that reject meaning in favor of sensations and strangeness—and that is precisely what Italian Brainrot is. It is a subject worthy of deeper investigation.

Italian Brain Rot – Types

Tralalero Tralala

Tralalero Tralala is a three-legged shark wearing Nike shoes, often depicted in dynamic poses. Its characteristic phrase, “Tralalero Tralala,” has become the trend’s hallmark. This character often appears in confrontations with other figures, such as Bombardiro Crocodilo.

Tralalero Tralala

Bombardiro Crocodilo is a hybrid of a crocodile and a military bomber. It is often portrayed as an antagonist in memes, symbolizing destructive force. Its presence emphasizes the absurdity and surrealism of Italian Brainrot.

Bombardiro Crocodilo

Bombardiro Crocodilo is a hybrid of a crocodile and a military bomber. It is often portrayed as an antagonist in memes, symbolizing destructive force. Its presence emphasizes the absurdity and surrealism of Italian Brainrot.

Bombardiro Crocodilo

Lirili Larila

Lirili Larila is a combination of an elephant and a cactus, moving around the desert in flip-flops. It represents combining nature with elements that do not fit reality, which perfectly aligns with the aesthetic of AI memes.

Lirili Larila

Brr Brr Patapim

Brr Brr Patapim is a hybrid of the famous “Nosacz” monkey and a tree, with large feet and a distinctive nose. This character appears in humorous contexts and often represents the more “wild,” forest-like side of this trend.

Brr Brr Patapim

Ballerina Cappuccina

Ballerina Cappuccina is a ballerina with a cappuccino cup instead of a head, dressed in a classic ballet outfit. It is an example of combining everyday elements with the aesthetics of art, which in Italian Brainrot leads to visual parody.

Ballerina Cappuccina

Chimpanzini Bananini

Chimpanzini Bananini is a monkey with banana-like elements, often depicted in mocking situations. The humor lies in the childish association—the combination of an animal and food—executed with the exaggerated style typical of the trend.

Chimpanzini Bananini

Boneca Ambalabu

Boneca Ambalabu is a frog with a tire-like body and human legs. It is one of the leading characters in the Indonesian version of brainrot. Its popularity shows how the Italian style has been adapted by other cultures.

Boneca Ambalabu

Tung Tung Tung Sahur

Tung Tung Tung Sahur is an anthropomorphic character resembling a stick or club, often holding a baseball bat. It refers to the morning call to sahur—the meal eaten by Muslims before sunrise during Ramadan. Despite the spiritual context, the character maintains an absurd tone.

Tung Tung Tung Sahur

Bombombini Gusini

Bombombini Gusini is a goose integrated with a bomber, appearing in war-themed and militaristic parodies. Its appearance continues the “animal + machine” motif typical of the Italian Brainrot trend and represents one of its more visually spectacular combinations. It often works together with Bombardiro Crocodilo.

Bombombini Gusini

Events

Oh No, the Police

In spring 2025, a new theme joined the world of absurd Italian Brainrot memes: characters being arrested by the police. It all started with a video by TikToker @brainrot7708, in which the Hotspot Bro meme character is detained by AI police while a dramatic “No, la polizia” plays in the background. The AI voice, styled to sound Italian, quickly became a viral sound, used both in memes featuring characters such as Tralalero Tralala and Brr Brr Patapim, and in everyday scenes—from traffic stops to animals in police cars.

The phenomenon relies on a simple contrast: grotesque, surreal creatures fall into the hands of the “law enforcement officers,” which, combined with the AI’s theatrical voice, produces an effect of pure absurdity. Within a few weeks, the sound “No, la polizia” appeared in hundreds of thousands of videos, becoming another viral motif in Brainrot culture—just as bizarre as it is universally understandable.

https://brainrotanimal.com

https://brainrothub.com/wiki/italian-brainrot

https://www.wikihow.com/Italian-Brainrot

Summary: Italian Brainrot – Silly Content Has a Long Tradition

Italian Brainrot is one of the most absurd internet phenomena of recent years — aesthetically chaotic, formally inconsistent, yet at the same time strikingly resonant with the spirit of contemporary social media. Memes about shark-bombers in Nike shoes or cactus-elephants with flippers seem stupid… and that is precisely where their strength lies.

Yes, there are potential risks. Uncontrolled consumption of this type of content can lead to overstimulation, superficial communication, and the loss of the need for logical context. Younger generations may also have difficulty distinguishing playful use of form from reality. However, like any meme trend, this one too is harmless as long as it is used in moderation and with awareness.

It is worth remembering that silly phenomena are nothing new. In the 2000s, we laughed at Rickroll, in the 2010s at trollfaces, and then came vines, the Harlem Shake, Ugandan Knuckles, and “Skibidi Toilet.” Italian Brainrot is simply the latest incarnation of the same need—to blow off steam from everyday life through pure absurdity. And although today we look at it with amusement or disbelief, in a few years, the memory of “Tralalero Tralala” may be a symbol of 2025 meme nostalgia for many.