In the first half of 2025, she racked up over 55 million views on TikTok and four million likes, mostly from tweens glued to their cellphones. Not bad for an artificial intelligence-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 Italian — or, 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.
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