“Skibidi Tentafruit Island”, “Fruit Love Island”: these AI-generated reality shows with tens of millions of views on TikTok

“Fraisita”, “Pomito”, “Bananella”… In recent days, these human-shaped fruits have been viral on TikTok. Published on the OnlyMoviesfr account, “L’île de la Skibidi Tentafruit” is a new genre of reality TV entirely generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and whose episodes have accumulated up to 14.3 million views.

As in the program from which it is freely inspired, “Temptation Island”, four couples, here in the form of anthropomorphic fruits similar to those of the Oasis soda brand, test their fidelity on two different paradise islands. The men on the one hand live with single women “the temptresses” whose objective is to seduce them. The fidelity of women in a relationship is also tested by a group of “tempters”. In the TikTok version, each episode is relatively short (between 1 minute 30 and 6 minutes) and the candidates have particularly flowery language, which only generations Z and Alpha can understand.

If the show is a hit on the Chinese social network, other AI parodies of well-known reality shows have seen the light of day such as “Pascal le Grand fruit”, inspired by the TF1 show “Pascal, the big brother” or even “SeduFruit haute tension” for the Netflix program “Seduction haute tension”.

Many controversies

“Skibidi Tentafruit Island” is directly taken from the English version broadcast since March 13 on TikTok under the name “Fruit Love Island”. The Ai Cinema account, at the origin of the program, has 3.3 million followers in less than two weeks, a record in the history of the platform. Since then, dozens of accounts around the world have created their own version of reality TV. The mysterious owner of Ai Cinema interacts directly with fans in a chat channel, where he polls his followers’ opinions on the program and informs them about the release of the next episodes.

But “Fruit Love Island” is far from unanimous. The short videos contain explicit allusions and language. Eight episodes of the original version have already been deleted from the Chinese platform, due to “massive reports” according to the creator of Ai Cinema. This type of video entirely generated by AI is widely criticized, with some calling it “AI Slop”, an expression used to designate AI content deemed to be of no interest or quality which has been flooding platforms for several months.

The question of copyright is also at the center of questions. For now ITV, the British channel behind the original program “Love Island” has not reacted. But according to the American magazine Forbes, American production companies have already threatened legal action against Bytedance, the Chinese company which owns TikTok, pushing it to pause its AI video creation tool Seedance 2.0. In the same vein, ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, announced the closure of Sora, its AI video creation platform.

The explosion of these (very) short programs shows the growing appetite of younger people for “micro-dramas” on TikTok. Faced with this enthusiasm, particularly in China, the platform launched the Pine Drama application last January. Currently only available in the United States and Brazil, this new platform highlights mini-series shot in vertical format specifically for mobile viewing.