Why AI video took over memes

Memes have always been made with whatever was cheapest. Image macros came from free photo editors. Reaction GIFs came from ripping a second of TV. Short video came from the phone in your pocket. In 2025 the cheapest way to make something ridiculous became typing a sentence — and the meme world moved in almost overnight.

Here is how it happened, and why AI video turned out to be such a good fit.

Early 2025: the creatures arrive

The first big wave didn't even need good video. Italian brainrot — absurd AI-made creatures like a shark in sneakers or a crocodile fused with a bomber plane, narrated by a synthetic voice reciting pseudo-Italian nonsense — spread across TikTok at the start of 2025 and kept going for the rest of the year. Names like Tralalero Tralala and Bombardiro Crocodilo became playground vocabulary.

The point wasn't realism. The point was that anyone could produce a new character in minutes, give it a name and a voice, and throw it into the shared universe. It was low effort by design, and that was the joke.

May 2025: the clips start talking

At Google I/O in May 2025, Google showed Veo 3, a video model that made the sound together with the picture: dialogue, sound effects, music, ambience. That changed what a single clip could hold. A generated clip was no longer a silent moving image that needed a voice-over — it could be a complete little scene, with a character saying a line on camera.

Formats followed immediately: fake street interviews, fake news anchors, fake documentaries about ridiculous subjects. The parodies worked because the formats were familiar and the content was absurd.

July 2025: the bunnies

At the end of July 2025 a clip styled as home security footage showed a group of bunnies bouncing on a backyard trampoline at night. It pulled in tens of millions of views within a day, according to PetaPixel and Lead Stories. Then people looked closer and noticed one bunny simply vanishes mid-jump. It was AI.

Two things came out of that. Copycats followed within days — raccoons, bears, kangaroos on trampolines — which is how you know something became a format. And the "spot the glitch" game became part of the fun. It was also a reminder of where the line is: a joke works best when everyone is in on it. (On trololo.tv that's a rule, not a suggestion — nothing may pass for real footage of a real event. See the content rules.)

Autumn 2025: a whole app of it

On 30 September 2025 OpenAI launched the Sora app: a scrolling feed made entirely of AI video, with cameos that let people put their own likeness into scenes. It climbed to No. 1 on the US App Store within days, as reported by TechCrunch and others. AI video wasn't a trick inside other platforms any more — it was a social network of its own.

Why it fits memes so well

Looking back, the match seems obvious:

• Speed. The distance between an idea and a clip is minutes. Memes live and die on timing, and AI video moves at meme speed.
• Absurdity is free. A fish running a bank, a cat filing taxes, a medieval knight at a drive-through — these used to need a VFX budget. Now they cost the same as anything else.
• Formats, not one-offs. Once a premise works, making the next variation is trivial. That's exactly how meme formats grow.
• Remix by default. If a clip is made from a written scene, someone else can take that scene, change one word and make it theirs.
• The glitches are funny. Melting hands and vanishing bunnies are bugs in a film. In a meme they're texture.

What's still hard

AI video made shots cheap. It didn't make comedy cheap.

• Consistency. Keeping a character looking the same across clips takes work — references and character sheets help a lot.
• Timing. Generated clips start slow and end late. The joke is often in the edit: cutting on the reaction, ending on the look. More on that in editing for comedy.
• Taste. A thousand people can generate a talking dog. The one who gives it a reason to talk wins.

From clips to shows

The next step is already visible: the most successful AI meme characters are the ones that come back. A recurring character with a premise is a show, and a show is something people follow, quote and remix.

That's why trololo.tv exists — a place for meme shows only, made with AI video. Start one, or read what a meme show is first.

Sources: PetaPixel on the trampoline bunnies · Lead Stories fact check · Know Your Meme · TechCrunch on the Sora app · MIT Technology Review on AI slop