Sneajer, Big Head Man Man, Alex Balita
Three Creators Worth Following, Slop Included
This is an excerpt; read the entire piece on the 65,000 website.
This piece is the second edition of a new monthly series highlighting strange internet creators. Read the first edition here. Future editions of this list series will be exclusive content for paid subscribers here on Substack.
Sneajer
The AI slop of Sneajer (@sneajer_) started as a reimagining of the Sneakers OāToole scene in Family Guy in which a jolly cutscene character refuses to remove his footwear. The scene initially became YouTube Poop fodder in 2019, years after the original episode aired in 2007.
This decade, Sneakers OāToole has remained relevant among a new generation of absurdist video editors, first manifesting in meta Sludge Content (cast above Subway Surfers gameplay and drowned by other visual ephemera) and currently manifesting in AI remakes that reverse engineer the scene, largely spearheaded by Sneajer on TikTok and Instagram.
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Thereās something about the sceneās premise and protagonist that has resonated with post-ironic creators in the long tail of Family Guyās ironic meme relevancy. Perhaps itās the characterās overall irrelevancy to the scene that it cuts from, in which the Griffin family is driving and Brian uses ātrying to get Sneakers OāToole to take his sneakers offā as an example of an impossible task. The introduction establishes Sneakers OāToole as a well-known figure in the Quahog dimension.
Itās an example of hilariously lazy world-building that Family Guy is lauded for by post-ironic meme creators because it functions in the same way that post-ironic memes do: present a random subject as an already well-understood joke in the language of a meme, and thatās the meme. Viewers already attuned to the trick will glob onto the manufactured inside joke. In the case of Sneakers OāToole, itās the language of a Family Guy cutscene that Family Guy is toying with.
AI remakes of Sneakers OāToole is how Sneajer started ā and itās how the creator got their name (it reads like an AI voice garbling the key word) ā but Sneajerās content has since mutated into a pseudo-educational slop farm that uses OāToole and other characters from the current brainrot zeitgeist as a mesmerizing visual concoction that sneakily slips in K-12 subjects.
Itās a furthering of Sludge Content in the current AI landscape. The imagined ADD-brained youth, the target audience, is unfortunately indoctrinated by it, said to be humorously dependent on it for academic growth. (They should just play these videos in kindergarten! Itās how they learn!)
One recurring educator in Sneajerās videos is a Minecraft Steve version of streamer Flight. He spouts facts about ancient history, mathematics, and geography. His face morphs throughout the video, showing the hallucinations of the AI-video tool, Veo3, trying to keep his appearance but failing.
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The āfailingā forms the crux of Sneajerās videos, like in most satirical AI slop content that takes pleasure in the randomized happenings of the tech. Then, the āfun factsā educational theme adds another crucial layer of irony.
With both, the videos become meta-commentary on earnest, educational AI slop, characterized by dubbed YouTube Shorts that exist between brain rot and brain nourishment. (Why read about dinosaurs when thereās a Shorts account rapid-firing the info?) iPad babies gobble that shit up, outbidding the average schoolteacher and picture book in the attention economy, trying to compete with the monstrosity.
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Sneajer also tags all of their videos with #china. Itās an echoing of a Western stigma about Chinese social media that suggests that, because of Chinaās censorship laws, transgressive and naughty posting is not allowed, so wholesome and educational content prevails, although itās overall vapid.
The West gleans this from the Chinese social trends that leak. The āWhat Kind of Awesome is This?ā videos are one example, in which two dopey voices teach the viewer about different fruits, animals, and levels of awesomeness. They were all reposted to TikTok from Chinese social sites like Douyin and BiliBili by anonymous accounts with spammy, randomized usernames.
They were translated into English for TikTok, where many viewers seem to be aware that the slop traveled internationally. In fact, the adaptation fits into the narrative of Chinaās world takeover. The viewer, who is already feeling a bit Chinese themselves, sarcastically embraces the outstretched hand of the East, which has even conquered the mindless video realm of their daily attention-sucking sessions. They then enjoy the content for its sheer dystopia, modernity, and lowness.
Sneajer has taken a similarly imperialistic approach by dubbing their videos into different languages for an added layer of meta-commentary. Many are translated into Chinese, possibly in hopes of spreading it there in reverse as a form of retaliation.
The āWhat Kind of Awesome is This?ā voices have also degraded in similar bastardizations of Chinese slop on the American web. Recent iterations of the meme have the two voices talking hopelessly.
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āCan this fruit be eaten? I donāt fucking know. After all, we all end up dead anyway.ā
People watching Sneajerās videos arenāt necessarily laughing but instead seem to be thinking, āHmm, interesting,ā and adding it to their mental library of current happenings and aesthetics in the early AI era. Thatās what Iām doing at least.
āThe guy who writes this into the AI is just walking among us like a normal person,ā wrote one TikToker in the creatorās comment section, reminding us of the horror, the skinwalker, blending into the crowd.
You can follow Sneajer on Instagram at @sneajer_ or on TikTok at @sneajer.
Big Head Man Man
Some people are too shy to interview strangers on the street. Asking randoms āwould you ratherā questions is lucrative, but if you donāt have the mojo or the physical stamina, youāll never catch up to your peers naturally getting āHawk tuah!ā out of drunk college girls in Nashville. Enter AI-video tools, which allow an introvert to compete with the best vox pop influencers on the web.
The account Big Head Man Man is maybe the first foray into such a persona. The AI character looks like a walking Bitmoji potato. āI trickā is a tattoo on his cheek, but in some videos it reads āI rickā or āIĢ·ĶĢĢĶĢ°Ķ Ģ·ĶĢĶtĢµĢ
ĢĶĢ»rĢ¶Ķ ĢŗĢĶiĢ·ĶĶĢĢ¼ĢcĢ¶ĶĶĢĢ£kĢ¶ĢĶĢĢŖĢ¬Ķ.ā Heās constantly morphing. Nothing is consistent, not even the art style. Sometimes heās a line-drawn cartoon. In others, heās a full-sized man. Sometimes heās holding the microphone. In others, the interviewee is inexplicably holding the mic.
In one of my favorites, Big Head starts out normally sized, but by the second clip, heās tiny and standing on a table. He ends the video by scatting nonsense under his breath as it fades to black.
Whoeverās generating this content isnāt filtering the bad takes. The clips are going straight from AI to Instagram. The middlemanās doing nothing. However, unlike Sneajer, the touch of a real person can be sensed in Big Head Man Man because he reads like a self-insert character. Itās like the person behind him genuinely has social anxiety, and this is the only way he can replicate the interview content he sees consistently going viral on the webā¦
ā¦Read the rest of this piece on the 65,000 website.
