Why Italian Brainrot Might Be the Mickey Mouse of AI Art
AI art deserves its own weird icon and it might already exist
From a design perspective, Mickey Mouse is the perfect symbol for animation. Three circles form a head and two ears that never overlap. He only exists in two dimensions. His iconography couldn’t have existed before cartoons.
AI Art Needs Its Own Icon
I’ve long searched for an equivalent cultural marker that could only exist in this new medium of AI. Not something polished or corporate, but something that feels born from the machine itself. Glitchy, participatory, and joyfully wrong.
That’s why the truest icons of AI aren’t masterpieces at all. They are the messy, surreal menagerie of Italian Brainrot.
Italian Brainrot
“Brainrot,” Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year, describes absurd, low effort content. Italian Brainrot takes it further with AI generated characters that have faux Italian names and bizarre bodies. Kids adore them. Adults are baffled. They are the 21st century heirs to Garbage Pail Kids, but made by the children themselves.
Each creature is a surreal mash up, like a three legged shark in Nike sneakers or a ballet dancer with a cappuccino cup for a head. The humor is nonsensical, generational, and untranslatable. The fun lies in trying to stump the AI, birthing creatures that exist purely for their wrongness.
Like medieval map monsters, these hybrids expand the edges of imagination. They mutate endlessly through new prompts. Each variation is part of a collective joke. This evolution is the essence of AI art. Constant mutation, not perfection.
AI Cat Soap Operas
Another AI native genre is the cat soap opera. These are short AI videos of anthropomorphic cats in tragic melodramas. They parody morality tales like infidelity, revenge, and neglect. The cats are rich, vain, and doomed. Think Tom & Jerry meets The Real Housewives, rendered in uncanny fur.
Their rules are strict. Moral failure. Mansion settings. Beautiful bodies. A crying kitten. And overused soundbites like “Oh no” or “Oh my God.” Often set to a meow meow remix of Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For.” These “sloperas” are both grotesque and addictive.
Channels like Super Cat League, with 3.9 million subscribers, prove this isn’t niche. It is mass entertainment, generated and replicated endlessly.
Garbage Iconography
The Italian Brainrot and cat sloperas got it right. They are chaotic, participatory, and unmistakably now. Born of absurd prompts and collective remixing.
AI’s artistic canon is a crowd sourced pantheon of cursed gods and trash icons. A lot dumb. A little genius. Not timeless, but absolutely of our time.