OPINION: Love, drama and artificial intelligence

Editor's note: All opinions, columns and letters reflect the views of the individual writer and not necessarily those of the IDS or its staffers.

AI-generated TikTok series, “Fruit Love Island,” already has two seasons.

Yes, you read correctly. Two seasons.

From the dramatic Cherrita to the questionable Bananito and the confident Grapenzo, a whole cast of produce is floating around my TikTok feed. The show returned with the first three chapters of its ongoing second season in April 2026. Except this time, we have vegetables.

I have to admit it. The series can be entertaining. Every time one of those videos pops up in my feed, I’m hooked until the very end, captivated by how the fruits were stressed about who the viewers would vote to send home. I would have never imagined that a series about fruits trying to find love would be created even by humans, let alone AI, but here we are.

However, there is also something incredibly weird and uncomfortable about watching them.

The animation is unnatural. The characters look uncanny. Their movements are sometimes completely wrong. Sometimes, their facial expressions don’t match what they are saying or they suddenly look different from one moment to another. The animation makes nothing look quite right, but the story keeps going as if everything is completely okay.

Maybe that is part of what draws people in. Maybe the weirdness is what people find interesting.

But why are we becoming so comfortable watching something created entirely from a machine?

AI is no longer limited to helping us write an email, answer homework questions or correct a sentence. It is now presenting itself in the production and entertainment industry. And it’s happening quickly.

The global AI filmmaking market was valued at $3.2 billion in 2024. Between 2026 and 2033, it is projected to grow from $4.6 billion to $23.5 billion, which equals an annual growth rate of 25.4%.

Those numbers make a fruit reality show feel a little less ridiculous. Maybe it’s a preview of where entertainment is going.

AI can make production cheaper and faster. It helps in pre-production by pitching visuals, concepts and ideas. It accelerates the production process by reducing reshoots and streamlining postproduction tasks like animation and visual effects. In an industry where production can be expensive and time-consuming, this support sounds really useful.

Hollywood studios and filmmakers are experimenting with AI-generated backgrounds, special effects and synthetic performers, which could reduce production costs by 20% to 50%.

Now, I don’t think using AI in a piece of entertainment makes it automatically less meaningful. Even if the industry uses this technology, a human still has to come up with the idea, decide what they want to make and find a way to make it interesting for people to watch it. AI can be a tool, just like a camera, editing software or special effects.

In “Fruit Love Island” we are aware that there was no actor, or even voice actor, performing the scene, no animator spending hours modeling the characters and no writer orchestrating the fruits and their romantic endeavors. Instead, a system generated everything and it still looks like something you can watch on television.

AI can imitate human creativity incredibly well. It can give us characters, dialogues, timelines and plot twists. But I think that it cannot give us the same feeling that something created by another human gives us.

Human-created movies or shows are not just final projects. They are ideas that someone had and made reality. I’m seeing their inspiration, personal experiences and creative decisions.

Those characteristics make a piece of art feel human.

We can still work with AI on our side. We can use it to make processes faster, or to organize ideas. In the film industry, it will be a very useful tool because of how much time and money it saves throughout the production process. But we can’t get to the point of using it to create something entirely from scratch.

AI will not give us human emotion. Both actors and the filmmakers bring feeling and intention to the piece, allowing us to connect with the project. They make us laugh, cry and shake with rage.

AI is growing fast and we can’t ignore it. Something that would have sounded completely absurd a few years ago is now able to appear between a dance trend and someone’s get-ready-with-me. The craziest thing is that we simply watch it without thinking twice.

Astrid Alomia (she/her) is a sophomore studying journalism with a concentration in public relations and a minor in marketing.