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In the first half of 2025, she racked up over 55 million views on TikTok and 4 million likes, mostly from tweens glued to their cellphones. Not bad for an AI-generated cartoon ballerina with a cappuccino teacup for a head. Her name is Ballerina Cappuccina. Her smiling, girlish face is accompanied by a deep, computer-generated male voice singing in Italianor, at least, some Italian. The rest is gibberish. She is one of the most prominent characters in the internet phenomenon known as Italian Brain Rot,” a series of memes that exploded in popularity this year, consisting of unrealistic AI-generated animal-object hybrids with absurdist, pseudo-Italian narration. The trend has baffled parents, to the delight of young people experiencing the thrill of a new, fleeting cultural signifier that is illegible to older generations. Experts and fans alike say the trend is worth paying attention to, and tells us something about the youngest generation of tweens. A nonsensical, AI-generated realm The first Italian brain-rot character was Tralalero Tralala, a shark with blue Nike sneakers on his elongated fins. Early Tralalero Tralala videos were scored with a curse-laden Italian song that sounds like a crude nursery rhyme. Other characters soon emerged: Bombardiro Crocodilo, a crocodile-headed military airplane; Liril Laril, an elephant with a cactus body and slippers; and Armadillo Crocodillo, an armadillo inside a coconut, to name a few. Content creators around the world have created entire storylines told through intentionally ridiculous songs. These videos have proven so popular that they have launched catchphrases that have entered mainstream culture for Generation Alpha, which describes anyone born between 2010 and 2025. Fabian Mosele, 26, calls themselves an Italian brain rot connoisseur. An Italian animator who lives in Germany and works with AI by trade, Mosele created their first Italian brain-rot content in March. Shortly after, Mosele’s video of Italian brain-rot characters at an underground rave garnered about a million views overnight, they said. It has since topped 70 million. Even as the hysteria over the absurdist subgenre has slowed, Mosele said the characters have transcended the digital realm and become an indelible part of pop culture. It feels so ephemeral,” Mosele said, but it also feels so real. This summer, one of the most popular games on Roblox, the free online platform that has approximately 111 million monthly users, was called “Steal a Brainrot.” The goal of the game, as the title would suggest, is to steal brain-rot characters from other players. More popular characters, like Tralalero Tralala, are worth more in-game money. Sometimes, the games’ administratorswho are also playerscheat to steal the characters, a move called “admin abuse” that sent many kids and teens into a frenzy. One video of a young child hysterically crying over a stolen character has 46.8 million views on TikTok. It’s not supposed to make sense In the non-virtual world, some have made physical toy replicas of the characters, while others have created real-life plays featuring them. The nonsensical songs have at times gestured to real-world issues: One clip of Bombardiro Crocodilo sparked outrage for seemingly mocking the war in Gaza. But ultimately, the majority of videos are silly and absurd. Mosele said Italian brain-rot consumers largely dont care about how the images relate to what is being said or sung. They often dont even care to translate the nonsensical Italian to English. Its funny because its nonsense, Mosele said. Seeing something so dark, in a way, and out of the ordinary, that breaks all the norms of what we would expect to see on TVthats just super appealing. The rise of brain rot Italian brain rot didnt go viral in a vacuum. Brain rot, the 2024 Oxford University Press word of the year, is defined as the numbing of an intellectual state resulting from the “overconsumption of trivial or unchallenging material. It can also be used to describe the brain-rotting content itself. Lots of content falls into that category. Consider videos of the game Subway Surfers split-screened next to full episodes of television shows, or Skibidi Toilet, an animated series featuring toilets with human heads popping out of their bowls. Those not chronically online might instinctively recoil at the term “brain rot,” with its vaguely gory connotations, especially as concern about the potential harms of social media for adolescents mounts. When “brain rot” was crowned word of the year, Oxford Languages President Casper Grathwohl said the term speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time. Emilie Owens, 33, a children’s media researcher, agreed that endless scrolling poses dangers for young people. But she said that the concern about brain rot is misguided. It’s normal to view the thing the newest generation is doing with fear and suspicion,” she said, pointing to how past generations have had similar concerns about the detrimental effects of comic books, television, and even novels at one time. Concerns about brain rotthat it is unproductive and pointlessactually reveal a great deal about their appeal, Owens said. Brain rot is an acute rejection of the intense pressures on young people to self-optimize. Its very normal for everyone to need to switch their brains off now and again, she said. By Safiyah Riddle, Associated Press/Report For America Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
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E-Commerce
When you hear governance, what pops to mind? We often picture limitations or roadblocks. Yet the opposite is true, particularly with artificial intelligence. AI governance is about discovering what your organization can do. Organizations implementing comprehensive AI governance experience measurable returns, including $840,000 in operational efficiency gains and 80% in productivity improvements. Building out your AI roadmap requires a mindset shift. These ideas will move you from limitation to acceleration. CLARIFY YOUR BUSINESS CONCERNS Implementing AI governance helps you learn what your business needs. Every business has constraints, like legal obligations, privacy rules, and internal risk tolerances. Every company also has ambitionsefficiency, acceleration, or gaining a competitive advantage. Governance lets you express your boundaries and goals within a scalable system. Dont think of it as a checklist. Think of it as a steering wheel. Before rushing to deploy the latest model, answer this: What AI technology is mature enough to be useful for us right now, and which parts of the business are ready for it? That framing alone changes the game. Governance becomes less about saying no and more about learning whats viable. Many organizations have swiftly adopted internal-facing AI tooling, with uses for documentation, meeting summaries, and extracting key insights from reports. The risk is lower, the value is immediate, and accountability is clear. Governance plays a different role in higher-risk domains. iCAD, a healthcare technology company using AI to help identify breast cancer, is developing end-user services. Their models score lesions and cases based on diverse global data sets. This isnt casual experimentation; it’s AI applied with domain specificity, regulatory oversight, and extremely high reliability standards. In both cases, governance didnt slow things down. It helped define where AI could make an immediate impact. ACCEPT THAT THERES NOT ONE MAGIC FRAMEWORK In the early days of the internet, downloading a single JPEG took 30 minutes. Building a basic website lasted weeks. There wasnt one standard for everything. We iterated as we went and accepted that because we knew what the web could unlock. Were in a similar moment with AI governance. Right now, theres no magic bullet. No single framework works for every company, every team, or every use case. We must understand the different dimensions of needs. A tool managing data provenance isnt the same as one that ensures secure software runtimes. AI governance is about intentionality. Resist the temptation to have organization-wide, looming mandates for AI usage. That suppresses the ability of individual business functions to discover whats right for them. Sometimes, the best solution might be an outsourced, third-party AI service; that idea may be unfeasible in other scenarios. Governance at this stage is about enabling safe, domain-specific exploration. COMMUNICATE AND OFFER TRANSPARENCY In our report, Bridging the AI Model Governance Gap, we asked respondents what would most help improve model governance. Their top three: better-integrated tools, better visibility into model components, and team training. The common thread between those priorities is transparency. About three in four companies have a fragmented toolchain, a set of tools to build or develop software. Thats okayif you understand why youre doing it. Large governance failures come from misaligned teams, not bad tools. This misalignment can play out poorly in the real world. Air Canada had a chatbot deliver false discount information to a passenger, then refused to honor what the chatbot said. The airline claimed the chatbot was a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions. The courts disagreed, and the public trust fallout was worse than the legal ruling. The governance around this AI lacked a shared understanding of accountability, review, and team communication. Grow that trust by bringing together the legal team, compliance, and data steward, letting them ride alongside the builders. Bring together the most open-minded people from each group to co-create and develop governance in tandem, rather than adding it afterward. MOVE QUICKLY AND SUPPORT YOUR TEAM The AI landscape is constantly evolving through regulatory landscapes, compliance requirements, and licensing uncertainties. A team somewhere stood up a new data pipeline while you read that last sentence. In this environment, governance helps your teams to operate quickly without crashing through new habits, new tools, and a new level of discipline. If your teams deploy projects with significant AI coding, expect to write more monitoring, tests, and validation suites. Does it work? is no longer the question. Instead, ask, Can we explain why it works, and what happens if it doesnt? Theres a reason F1 race car drivers spend time strengthening their neck muscles. When that 5G turn hits, they dont get whipsawed. Its all in the preparation. Part of any teams time should be allocated to professional development. They can learn best practices, experiment, and figure out how to implement real guardrails at business and technology levels. Governance and experimentation cant be split like a budget. Embed both at the team level. Governance is an emerging discipline. The teams building that muscle now are laying the foundation for long-term advantage. Peter Wang is the cofounder and chief AI and innovation officer of Anaconda.
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E-Commerce
U.S. stocks are wobbling Friday as Wall Street questions whether the U.S. job market has slowed by just enough to get the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates to help the economy, or by so much that a downturn may be on the way. After jumping to an early gain, the S&P 500 erased it and fell 0.4% below the all-time high it set the day before. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 203 points, or 0.4%, as of 11:45 a.m. Eastern time, after swinging between a gain of 148 points and a loss of 409. The Nasdaq composite slipped 0.1%. The action was more decisive in the bond market, where Treasury yields tumbled after a report from the U.S. Labor Department said employers across the country hired fewer workers in August than economists expected. The U.S. government also said that earlier estimates for June and July overstated hiring by 21,000 jobs. The disappointing numbers follow last months weaker-than-expected update, along with other lackluster reports in the intervening weeks, and traders now are betting on a 100% probability that the Fed will cut its main interest rate at its next meeting on Sept. 17, according to data from CME Group. Such cuts can give a kickstart to the economy and job market, but the Fed has held off on them this year because they can also give inflation more fuel. Until now, the Fed has been more worried about the potential of inflation worsening because of President Donald Trumps tariffs than about the job market. But Fridays job numbers were weak enough that they could even push the Fed to consider cutting rates by a deeper-than-usual amount in two weeks, said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management. This week has been a story of a slowing labor market, and todays data was the exclamation point, according to Ellen Zentner, chief economic strategist for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. While the data on the job market is disappointing, its still not so weak that its screaming a recession is here, and the U.S. economy is continuing to grow. A big question for investors is whether the job market can remain in a balance where its not so strong that it prevents cuts to interest rates but also not so weak that the economy falls off. Uncertainty about that helped lead to Friday’s swings in the stock market. Wall Street needs things to go as hoped because it already sent stock prices to records amid expectations for a Goldilocks scenario where interest rates ease, and the economy keeps chugging along. On Wall Street, Friday’s heaviest weight on the stock market was Nvidia, the chip company thats become the face of the artificial-intelligence boom. Its been facing criticism that its stock price charged too high, too fast and became too expensive amid Wall Streets rush into AI, and it fell 2.9%. Lululemon dropped 18.1% after the yoga and athletic gear makers revenue for the latest quarter fell short of analysts expectations. CEO Calvin McDonald pointed to disappointing results from its U.S. operation, as its international results saw positive momentum. CFO Meghan Frank said Lululemon is facing industrywide challenges, including higher tariff rates. They helped offset a leap of 9.3% for Broadcom after it reported better profit and revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected. CEO Hock Tan said customers are continuing to invest strongly in AI chips, and the company expects revenue from them to accelerate. Tesla rose 3% after proposing a payout package that could reach $1 trillion for CEO Elon Musk if the electric vehicle company meets a series of extremely aggressive targets over the next 10 years. Smith & Wesson Brands jumped 6% after the gun maker delivered better results for the latest quarter than analysts expected. It reported a loss, but CEO Mark Smith said it saw good demand for its new products in what’s traditionally a slow season for sales of firearms. In stock markets abroad, indexes in Europe lost early gains to turn lower with Wall Street. That followed strength across much Asia. In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 rallied 1% after data showed accelerating growth in earnings for Japanese workers. Chinese markets rebounded following three days of decline. Indexes jumped 1.4% in Hong Kong and 1.2% in Shanghai. In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury tumbled to 4.07% from 4.17% late Thursday and from 4.28% on Tuesday. Thats a notable move for the bond market. The two-year Treasury yield, which more closely tracks expectations for Fed action, fell even more. It dropped to 3.47% from 3.59% late Thursday. Stan Choe, AP business writer AP Writers Matt Ott and Teresa Cerojano contributed.
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