the second age of allegory

“You’re home! Did you have to stay late again?”The male strawberry embraces his wife and goes back to washing the dishes. He’s a loving husband, doing his part as a homemaker while she earns the wages. He’s not at all concerned about her domineering manager, a banana in a business suit.If you’re familiar with AI fruit videos, you already know where this is going. It’s the same story every time: the strawberry wife has been cheating, and eventually the secret is revealed when she gives birth to a banana son.It’s easy to write off AI slop as meaningless drivel, and in one sense it is. I doubt the creators of these videos have any intention other than going viral. At the same time, to go viral, you need to recreate the emotions targeted by engagement optimization algorithms.1 One of those emotions appears to be a fear of interracial cuckoldry. After analyzing over 100 cheating fruit videos, I found that some fruits are more consistently coded as “masculine” or “feminine” than other…