“You heard it from bananito himself,” said the anonymous creator of Fruit love island on Saturday, posting an image of a Pixar-shaped banana wearing Hawaiian shorts. “Goodbye.” Hundreds of millions had followed a cast of AI-created fruits as they tried to find love on TikTok. The show had been running for just over a week before the creator left the platform, citing alleged mass reports from anti-AI parties. Concerned viewers may have been right to raise the alarm. But they are fighting a losing battle. Everything is happening online Fruit love island. All short video sites are populated by “slop” AI. It’s fast-paced and melodramatic and disturbing. Sometimes it’s ironic; sometimes it exists simply to keep the user connected, increasing advertising revenue for the generator. Now we are seeing it spill over into war, with Iran an unexpected pioneer of the form.
The regime’s highlight clip is two minutes long and goes like this: in the White House we meet Trump, Pete Hegseth and Satan, who are made of Lego. Lego Trump looks at a Lego replica of the Epstein Files. He gets frustrated and presses a Lego button, launching a Lego rocket at a Lego school. A Lego soldier cries and pulls a child’s backpack from the rubble; another sits in a war room under a portrait of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who in this scenario is not made of Lego. Lego bombs fall on military base in Cyprus; an American plane crashes on a set of Reaganite minifigures. Lego Burj Al Arab is under attack; so does Lego Tel Aviv. Lego Netanyahu runs to defend himself. Lego Strait of Hormuz closes; Lego tycoons cry as oil prices rise. Soldiers remove a Lego coffin from a US military helicopter. “In commemoration,” it says on a black screen, “of the 168 students from Minab who were martyred at the hands of Zionist and American terrorists.”
No one should say that the concept is insensitive. Innocent victims deserve more than a parody of a children’s movie. Its cheap production value makes it even worse. For many online viewers, AI comes with an anti-glare. Propaganda images of Iran are also images of the modern romance scam, Facebook clickbait, the cutting conglomerate and, most inconvenient of all, the White House X account. Trump’s social media team regularly uploads images of AI, most of them generated with the same disturbing slant on children’s media. They recently BROUGHT Trump in Animal Crossinga low-key farming video game to promote his agricultural policy. Last year he appeared like a Jedi light saber. And when an image of an ICE deportation went viral, his team posted a child-style version of Studio Ghibli.
Trump’s alignment with AI comes quite naturally. He won over voters by positioning himself as a counter to America’s cultural elite, the same people in charge of “woke” media and entertainment. It stands for Middle America; his enemies command the “failed New York Times” on one coast and “Liberal Hollywood” on the other. AI companies promise to replace them by giving anyone the tools to make an approximation of a big-budget Hollywood movie. This may work for the anonymous creator of the Fruit love island. It won’t work for the old men of the world.
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AI is a leveling technology. It has given two very different world powers access to the same taste, or lack thereof, and eternal rights to the same looted library of images. Whatever comes out of it loses its cultural character. For one odd week last year, the hyper-Japanese Hayao Miyazaki belonged to everyone; the Studio Ghibli style simply melted into an existing wasteland of the aesthetic scheme, with any local associations replaced by irony. In this case, the propaganda images come from children’s films, while children’s films are financed by Hollywood capital. The open-eyed characters in the AI clips originally come from Pixar Studios; once run through Sora or Stable Diffusion, they look the same and thrill in the same melodramatic way no matter whose territory you’re standing in. Iran is agitating for its own interests, but the Lego bombings and plane crashes in its new propaganda are just an average of any exclusive American-made movie. You can make a case for AI as an exercise in soft power; American technology has forced American cultural forms to the fore.
But propaganda wars, like physical wars, are about state capacity, and in this case the means defeat themselves. Our Cold War-era tensions are almost all still present. But the tensions found are once formed as a distinct visual scheme. The various “views” of Soviet propaganda are still legible to us today. Mao’s ideological struggle against American capitalism also meant a deliberate rejection of a bright, cosmopolitan aesthetic that had taken root in the visual culture of urban China four decades earlier. The resulting propaganda films and posters articulated a specific Maoist vision of a better world, full of picturesque births and muscular farmers. Modern Iran remains in the shadow of its 1979 revolution, which brought a similar legacy of hand-painted utopian propaganda. However, nothing in this current war is different from anything else. It has been urged by ideological and religious forces, but none has found a voice. The leaders of America and Iran know what they want the future to look like, but their imaginations are fused together and the result is incoherent. The democratization of propaganda has failed; the results are nihilistic. Each side has a chance to win an online war. He can’t even articulate why he’s fighting.
(Further reading: Hollywood loves Russians again)
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