Over the past five days, an Instagram account called FruitvilleGossip has racked up more than 300,000 views on a series of videos titled Fruit Paternity Court. Featuring a cast of AI-generated fruit characters, the show pits a clementine mother of a baby tangerine against her prospective parent, Mr. Mike the mango. The results are not encouraging: Dr. Lime delivers an envelope containing the DNA test result to the judge, who informs us that Mr. Mike is not the father.

In a twist of plot and palate, viral AI fruit videos have taken over many social media feeds, with a common thread: women fruit characters facing humiliating scenarios and even violence. Repeatedly, fruit women cheat on their fruit husbands and boyfriends, often getting exposed and losing everything. Fruit babies born out of wedlock are thus often the wrong variety of fruit, leading to further humiliation.

The videos depict fruit women being slapped, berated, or worse—frequently having their fruit babies thrown out of windows to their eventual demise. There are AI fruit videos that heavily suggest acts of sexual violence, and fruit parents have sex with the friends of their fruit children, while the fruit women verbally abuse their own fruit offspring.

In one particularly ironic twist, a number of the videos punish female AI fruit characters for simply farting, with fruit men repeatedly kicking them out of their homes or even jailing them for passing gas. The creator of Fruit Paternity Court, a 20-year-old UK-based computer science student who declined to share his name with WIRED, claims that the most popular videos feature “super dramatic and scandalous” scenes.

The trend has not gone unnoticed; an associate professor of media studies at the University of Georgia notes that these narratives are mimicking actual violence against women seen on reality television. While the content may be real, the revenue is yet to catch up, as most accounts are too new to apply for TikTok’s Creator Fund or other ad revenue-sharing programmes.