The most popular AI-generated videos on YouTube — which one defines the AI era?

From the AI clip so bad it became a running joke to a full genre of surreal AI animal memes, AI-generated video has produced some genuinely wild viral moments in just a few years. Which one do you think best captures the moment?

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Will Smith Eating Spaghetti

In March 2023, an unsettling AI-generated clip of Will Smith eating spaghetti went viral for its grotesque, uncanny-valley visuals, produced using the early ModelScope text-to-video model. Rather than fading away, it became a running meme and informal industry benchmark: creators kept recreating the same prompt with newer AI video tools through 2024 and 2025 to show off how fast the technology was improving, culminating in near-photorealistic versions from later models. What started as a joke about how bad AI video looked became, almost accidentally, the clearest visual timeline of how quickly that changed.

Heart on My Sleeve

In April 2023, an anonymous creator using the name "Ghostwriter" released "Heart on My Sleeve," a song built on AI-cloned vocals mimicking Drake and The Weeknd. It racked up millions of streams and views within days before Universal Music Group forced it off Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube on copyright grounds. It became the defining early flashpoint in the music industry's fight over AI voice cloning, sparking debates that are still ongoing, and was even briefly floated for Grammy consideration before its removal made that a moot point.

Italian Brainrot

Italian Brainrot is a 2025 genre of AI-generated meme characters — surreal hybrid animal/object creations like Tung Tung Tung Sahur, Ballerina Cappuccina, and Bombardiro Crocodilo — narrated in nonsensical Italian and spread mainly through TikTok before exploding across every platform, YouTube included. It became a defining phenomenon among Gen Alpha kids almost overnight, spawning merchandise, mobile games, and international news coverage, while also drawing controversy over some characters' blasphemous or geopolitically charged undertones. It's arguably the fastest an entirely AI-native meme genre has gone from niche to global.

Corridor Crew's AI Anime Short

In March 2023, VFX studio Corridor Digital released "Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors," using Stable Diffusion-based AI stylization to convert live-action footage into an anime-style short film. It became one of the first mainstream demonstrations of AI-assisted animation actually working at a professional level, and it landed like a bombshell in the animation industry, sparking a major, still-ongoing debate over what AI tools mean for traditional hand-drawn animators' jobs. The team returned with a controversial sequel that reignited the same argument all over again.

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