The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: Humans Are in a Dance Battle With AI Babies

Your social media feed is probably showing you something totally different, but this week, young people are fleeing TikTok (or at least posting about fleeing TikTok), AI and humanity are locked in a high-stakes dance battle, AI food is yelling at everyone, and we're learning a lot about "young hos."

TikTok refugees head to Upscrolled

Since it was released in 2017, social media platform TikTok has been the way young people communicate, but that could be changing. Alarm over recent changes in the app's privacy policy and accusations that its new, American owners are messing up the algorithm have some users deleting their accounts and leaving. Or at least saying they're leaving. But where will they go?

The last time this kind of thing happened, TikTokers headed to another Chinese social media app called RedNote, but this time, a lot of people say they're migrating to Upscrolled. The app, which briefly hit number one on the app store charts, was created by Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian entrepreneur Issam Hijazi. Upscrolled promises an antidote to the "Double standards, algorithmic bias, selective censorship, and profit over principle" of other social media platforms. The app doesn't allow "hate speech" but promises less censorship of ideas, no shadow-banning, no data-sharing, and "No black-box AI" for curation, all delivered in a form-factor that's familiar to users.

So, what's the downside? Well, it's a small team and it seems to be having some issues with the number of downloads. More troubling are reports of a flood of antisemitic material appearing on the site. In a statement to The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Upscrolled spokeperson Gabriella Bord wrote, “Our content moderation hasn’t been able to keep up with the massive rise of users this week,” and “We’re working with digital rights experts to grow our Trust & Safety team and are beefing up our content moderation to prevent this," so maybe the moderation team is just having some growing pains.

Viral video of the week: human vs. AI baby dancing

This week's viral video is more of a viral video trend, and it involves a battle of dancing babies.

It starts with the post below, from @mindalchemy0236, which I apologize for in advance.

An ad for the "Baby Dance" app, this video has been viewed over 100 million times. It became so overplayed on TiKTok that users fought back in the only way they could: Through dance. In a modern re-enactment of the American myth of John Henry vs. the Steam Engine, users on TikTok are locked in dance battle with AI. People responded to the annoying ad with videos of their human children doing the same dance for real, joking that it was to save $1.98, the app's price.

Kids got into it, throwing shade at AI at the same time.

Then grown-ups got in on it,

Grannies started doing it,

and celebrities like Lisa Rinna got into the act.

So it turned into a whole thing, and according to some users, human users ended up winning because TikTok's algorithm is showing more human remakes than the original ad that annoyed everyone. What does it all mean? Is this how the robot-human war will be decided? How does it relate to the original dancing baby, one of our first internet memes? Is history turning back on itself and should we invest in Ally McBeal reruns? I just don't know, but for what it's worth, John Henry won the battle with the steam shovel, but the effort exhausted him and he died.

AI food yelling videos: brain rot that's good for you

I'm always trying to find good things about artificial intelligence. So far I got:

• Helping to cure cancer

• Finding Waldo

But I'm adding videos of food yelling at people.

For real though. This growing meme format involves asking AI to make videos of food angrily telling you how to properly and safely prepare and store it. They're entertaining, educational, and if one person remembers to throw away rice that's left out, it could save a life and be worth all that cooling water. Kids need to know all this junk and for some reason they like brain rot. Check out these meaty boys:

And these angry fellas:

I can't vouch for the accuracy of every food tip on the hashtag, but I watched a bunch of these videos and so far, they're solid.

What does "young ho" mean?

I'm sure you know what both "ho" and "young" mean, but put them together and it becomes something else, both a reclamation of the word "ho" and an expression of youth-based solidarity.

The trend started with mildly insulting, older-people-bag-on-youngins posts on X like this one:

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But over on TikTok, @kensdremgurl went viral by laying down a mini-manifesto for young hos:

Summing up the list with, "all a young ho is is someone who's freed themself from being inconvenienced."

Other TikTokers started listing which young ho traits they share

and making their own observations, adding these traits to the list:

• Getting up at 7:50 to be at work at 8.

• Throwing away the containers from Chinese food, even if their mom wants to save them.

• Airfrying chicken nuggets.

• Eschewing fitted sheets.

• Removing snow from car windows with a fork.

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