There’s trouble in AI-generated paradise. TikTok’s most popular AI-generated series “Fruit Love Island” has millions of followers, but that may not be enough to save it from video takedowns and shifting online attitudes toward AI.
“Fruit Love Island” is exactly what the title implies: a one-to-one recreation of the popular dating show Love Island, rendered with AI and featuring humanoid fruit as contestants. When hot new bombshells enter this villa, they’re anthropomorphic cherries, bananas, pineapples, and more.
“Welcome to Fruit Love Island, where eight single fruits are about to flirt, fight, and trust—things get messy fast,” begins the first episode.
“Fruit Love Island” is posted on an account called Ai Cinema. After launching on March 13, the account skyrocketed to more than 3 million followers in a little over a week, with every new video garnering tens of millions of views. As of March 31, the most popular episode has 38.7 million views and 1.8 million likes.
But lately, the account’s trajectory has reversed, with its creator complaining of criticism and its videos getting deleted. Of the 22 episodes of “Fruit Love Island” posted to TikTok, only 10 remain live, the other 12 apparently taken down from the app. The series’ YouTube account was also taken down.
Whether these incidents are due to mass reporting from reviewers or for potentially violating TikTok’s Community Guidelines (which outlaw content “that violates intellectual property rights”) is unclear. But one way or another, “Fruit Love Island” seems close to its expiration date.
‘Losing motivation’: The ‘Fruit Love Island’ creator on giving up the series
The person behind Ai Cinema complained about the shifting tides in the comments section of a recent episode.
“Guys I’m losing motivation. These videos take so long and the image and animation gen is getting so bad! I’m so sorry!” they wrote. “Also so much hate and all my vids removed is tough. We’ll get through it.”
They’ve also posted several Stories on TikTok responding to criticism (“Each episode takes hours,” they wrote in one post, adding that they have to “keep redoing things because the Al generation messes up constantly”) and threatening to stop posting “Fruit Love Island” altogether.
“No more fruit love island. Since people so obsessed with it,” they wrote. “All my videos banned I make no money.”
“Yall heard it from bananito himself,” they concluded, referencing one of the series’ main characters, a playboy banana with six-pack abs.
AI-generated video takes hit after hit
The sudden change in attitudes online toward series like “Fruit Love Island” reflects a larger trend around AI-generated content, particularly video.
Last week on March 25, OpenAI suddenly shuttered its video generation tool Sora, including its standalone app. The move also cost OpenAI a billion-dollar investment from Disney, along with the rights for more than 200 Disney characters to appear in Sora-generated videos.
Though Sora’s closure just months after the app’s launch came as a shock, new reporting from The Wall Street Journal reveals just how unsustainable the tool was for OpenAI. Sora was reportedly losing $1 million per day, and by the end of its life, the app had less than 500,000 worldwide users.
Meanwhile, dominant attitudes on social media toward AI-generated content are skewing more and more negative. Pop singer Zara Larsson recently came under fire for reposting a promo for an AI-generated series in which a chocolate bar seduces a strawberry. (Why every AI-generated animated series seems to fixate on food is its own mystery.)
And Ai Cinema’s comments section on TikTok is flooded not with fans, but with critics highlighting generative AI’s negative environmental impact, calling out the low quality of the series’ animation, and—perhaps most scathingly—saying that the series “isn’t even entertaining.”
More ways forward for AI video
The fall of Sora and souring attitudes may not be the nail in the coffin for AI-generated video. Though Disney’s deal with OpenAI fell through, the company hasn’t given up on its AI ambitions.
Disney is reportedly in active discussion with more than a dozen partners to find other ways to implement AI, and in a statement at the time of Sora’s closure, the company said it will “continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators.”
And for all their threats of cancelling “Fruit Love Island,” even the Ai Cinema creator seems determined to turn lemons into lemonade. Their bio on TikTok now links to another account, where they’re launching a new AI-generated series titled “The Shore Between Us.” The page has already amassed 189,000 followers, despite not yet posting a single episode.
On Monday, March 30, the creator posted the series’ first teaser, revealing that the project is essentially a clone of The Summer I Turned Pretty, except that the characters are—you guessed it—anthropomorphic fruit.
