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How to Renovate Your Home for a Billion Children

We kept seeing more and more utterly absurd, hugely viral, AI-fever-dream home remodeling videos on TikTok. So we tracked down where they actually come from.

Over the next 90 seconds, Little John transformed the tree into a maniacally space-efficient luxury unit in an AI-generated ballet of flying galvanized square steel, ecofriendly wood veneer, and expansion screws. As I set out to discover who was making these videos, I assumed that lifting the rock would reveal an even stranger world of broken social networks, AI content farms, and shady engagement hacks, wiggling just beneath the surface of the web. From the start, it exclusively posted videos with a specific format: Some kind of weird domestic issue must be solved with extreme home renovation, the action animated in a surreal CGI style with a spunky stock music soundtrack.

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