Don’t look now, but there’s an AI-generated Italian teacup on your child’s phone. What does it mean?

In the first half of 2025, she racked up over 55 million views on TikTok and 4 million likes, mostly from tweens glued to their cellphones. Not bad for an AI-generated cartoon ballerina with a cappuccino teacup for a head.

Her name is Ballerina Cappuccina. Her smiling, girlish face is accompanied by a deep, computer-generated male voice singing in Italian — or, at least, some Italian. The rest is gibberish.

She is one of the most prominent characters in the internet phenomenon known as “Italian Brain Rot,” a series of memes that exploded in popularity this year, consisting of unrealistic AI-generated animal-object hybrids with absurdist, pseudo-Italian narration.

The trend has baffled parents, to the delight of young people experiencing the thrill of a new, fleeting cultural signifier that is illegible to older generations.

Experts and fans alike say the trend is worth paying attention to, and tells us something about the youngest generation of tweens.

A nonsensical, AI-generated realm

The first Italian brain-rot character was Tralalero Tralala, a shark with blue Nike sneakers on his elongated fins. Early Tralalero Tralala videos were scored with a curse-laden Italian song that sounds like a crude nursery rhyme.

Other characters soon emerged: Bombardiro Crocodilo, a crocodile-headed military airplane; Lirilì Larilà, an elephant with a cactus body and slippers; and Armadillo Crocodillo, an armadillo inside a coconut, to name a few.

Content creators around the world have created entire storylines told through intentionally ridiculous songs. These videos have proven so popular that they have launched catchphrases that have entered mainstream culture for Generation Alpha, which describes anyone born between 2010 and 2025.

Fabian Mosele, 26, calls themselves an “Italian brain rot connoisseur.” An Italian animator who lives in Germany and works with AI by trade, Mosele created their first Italian brain-rot content in March. Shortly after, Mosele’s video of Italian brain-rot characters at an underground rave garnered about a million views overnight, they said. It has since topped 70 million.

Even as the hysteria over the absurdist subgenre has slowed, Mosele said the characters have transcended the digital realm and become an indelible part of pop culture.

“It feels so ephemeral,” Mosele said, “but it also feels so real.”

This summer, one of the most popular games on Roblox, the free online platform that has approximately 111 million monthly users, was called “Steal a Brainrot.” The goal of the game, as the title would suggest, is to steal brain rot characters from other players. More popular characters, like Tralalero Tralala, are worth more in-game money.

Sometimes, the games’ administrators — who are also players — cheat to steal the characters, a move called “admin abuse” that sent many kids and teens into a frenzy. One video of a young child hysterically crying over a stolen character has 46.8 million views on TikTok.

It’s not supposed to make sense

In the non-virtual world, some have made physical toy replicas of the characters, while others have created real-life plays featuring them.

The nonsensical songs have at times gestured to real-world issues: One clip of Bombardiro Crocodilo sparked outrage for seemingly mocking the war in Gaza.

But ultimately, the majority of videos are silly and absurd.

Mosele said Italian brain-rot consumers largely don’t care about how the images relate to what is being said or sung. They often don’t even care to translate the nonsensical Italian to English.

“It’s funny because it’s nonsense,” Mosele said.

“Seeing something so dark, in a way, and out of the ordinary, that breaks all the norms of what we would expect to see on TV — that’s just super appealing.”

The rise of brain rot

Italian brain rot didn’t go viral in a vacuum. “Brain rot,” the 2024 Oxford University Press word of the year, is defined as the numbing of an intellectual state resulting from the “overconsumption of trivial or unchallenging material.”

It can also be used to describe the brain-rotting content itself.

Lots of content falls into that category. Consider videos of the game “Subway Surfer” split-screened next to full episodes of television shows, or “Skibidi Toilet,” an animated series featuring toilets with human heads popping out of their bowls.

Those not chronically online might instinctively recoil at the term brain rot, with its vaguely gory connotations, especially as concern about the potential harms of social media for adolescents mounts.

When brain rot was crowned word of the year, Oxford Languages President Casper Grathwohl said the term speaks to “one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time.”

Emilie Owens, 33, a children’s media researcher, agreed that endless scrolling poses dangers for young people. But she said that the concern about brain rot is misguided.

It’s normal to “view the thing the newest generation is doing with fear and suspicion,” she said, pointing to how past generations have had similar concerns about the detrimental effects of comic books, television and even novels at one time.

Concerns about brain rot — that it is unproductive and pointless — actually reveal a great deal about their appeal, Owens said. Brain rot is an acute rejection of the intense pressures on young people to self-optimize.

“It’s very normal for everyone to need to switch their brains off now and again,” she said.

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Riddle is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.