If you havent been on TikTok in a while, you might have missed the newest Bigfoot style creature to get viral on the platform. Similar to the recently viral Yeti clip thats been going around, this new Cryptid is winter themed, and is called the Erosion Bird. If you have no clue what any of this means, itll be clear as a mountain sky momentarily.
How Do You Meme Erosion Birds?
The Erosion Birds are frequently featured in memes where the caption portrays them as a plug rather than as scary animals. This makes the entire genre consist of memes that say things like “My plug weird but he chill.”
Visit the Know Your Memes page on the meme to learn more about the complete history of Erosion Birds.
What Is The ‘Erosion Bird’?
To put it simply, the Erosion Bird is a collection of short looping videos and s that are meant to show a sequence of massive, bird-like creatures that live atop mountains that have never been seen before. After being formally unveiled on September 12th, 2023, these AI-generated birds swiftly took the platform by storm, sounding more like an SCP than a ridiculous TikTok fad.
Weirdcore and other extremely specialized content categories have been steadily gaining popularity on TikTok, and Erosion Birds have a lot going for them, such as their previously viral Cryptid Siren Head video. The purpose of making and sharing these and all subsequent videos is to demonstrate the potential of AI art while successfully incorporating a small amount of personal weirdness into TikTok’s general aesthetic, a feat accomplished by creator @Drevfx.
Terminally online people come across conspiracy theories pretty frequently. These have a distinct tone, with word choices and visual cues intended to captivate and persuade. Erosion Bird appropriates the aesthetics of this kind of content and parodies it by applying these cuesominous warnings, grainy footage, cryptic numbersto a ridiculous creature that doesn’t actually exist. Similar to how the visual codes and medium of television reverberate in non-TV-related visual forms, TikTok can serve as a testing ground for novel materials, procedures, and methods of operation.
In the 1870s, the new manufacture of premixed paint in portable tubes accompanied the development of plein air painting: Because of the new technology, Impressionists like Berthe Morisot and Claude Monet could go outdoors and capture a passing tint of natural light without needing to mix pigments by hand. Art reflects technological advances in -making, and meme trends like Erosion Bird (while definitely less significant for humanity, at least for now, than Impressionism) follow this pattern. Without AI generation and the network effects of TikTok, which allowed it to be cross-influenced by other meme trends like online cryptids, conspiracy aesthetics, and luh calm fit fashion posting, Erosion Bird wouldnt have happened. It reflects this new age in -making and culture and theres only more weirdness to come.
Erosion Bird plays with the unpredictability and incoherence created by AI: the bird appears in each meme slightly differently, and the strangeness of the medium corresponds with the strangeness of the creature.
Solitary cryptids, conceived by online artists and elaborated through a communal process, have been beloved meme figures since at least the days of the SCP Foundation wiki and Slenderman in the early 2010s. Erosion Bird, first posted by user @drevfx, works and circulates in the same way, but on TikTok. While it draws from a deep well of lore, the story of Erosion Bird is also profoundly 2023. Its the latest in a wave of memes generated by AI, a technology that has allowed creators to produce ever-more intricate content with relative ease.
However, detecting that you stayed a moment longer than usual on the weird bird TikTok, the algorithm serves you another. And another. Weeks later, youre at a Halloween party and somebody dressed exactly like the bird waddles up to you.
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