Welcome to our trip inside the culture of young people. This week, we’ve got the usual slang definitions of phrases like “you the birthday,” and “catch a fade,” and we’re also talking about AI. You might be about to lose your job to artificial intelligence, but younger generations are in danger of losing their reality to it. From viral “AI or animals” memes to the rise of AI detectives, the youth are engaged in a high-stakes game of “Spot the Bot” just to feel like they still have a grip on the truth.
The meaning of “you the birthday”
A new slang metaphor is blowing up TikTok this week. People are saying “you the birthday,” a phrase that means “you’re awesome” or “you’re great” in the way a birthday is great: fun, exciting, extra, etc. It’s usually meant in positive way, but it could be applied negatively to someone who is doing too much or trying to hard, like, “sure, you the birthday.”
The phrase seems to have originated in a song called “Birthday Girl” by Huncho. The song doesn’t actually include the phrase, “you the birthday,” but Huncho sings, “She eat, she the birthday—girl” and the pause was long enough that people started just saying, “you the birthday.”
“You the birthday” is inspiring a subgenre of birthday-related spin-off slang too. If you’re dressed funny, you the birthday clown. If you have a point, you the birthday hat. If you’re ugly, you the halloween. You get the idea.
What “catch a fade” means
To young people, “fade” means fight. To “catch a fade” means to have a fight. (If you’d like more definitions of slang words that kids use, check out Lifehacker’s Gen Z and Gen A slang glossary.)
Trend: fake Pizza Movie clips
Last week, I predicted Hulu’s Pizza Movie will be Generation Z’s defining druggie-comedy movie. There’s more evidence this week in the form of a growing trend online of making videos with random footage and labeling it “Pizza Movie (2026).” The joke is that the scenes presented in Pizza Movie‘s trailer are so without context and so strange that you can put any bizarre clips together and they might be from Pizza Movie.
Here are a couple of examples:
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What does “that’s AI” mean?
“That’s AI” is rapidly emerging as a way of saying “I don’t believe you” or “I doubt it” to members of Generations Alpha and Z. They obviously heard the phrase a lot in connection with videos and pictures online, so it only makes sense to apply it to anything.
Jeremy Carrasco: AI detective
Speaking of “that’s AI…” Bespectacled 30-something filmmaker Jeremy Carrasco is an unlikely hero to the teens and tweens of TikTok, but the videos he posts on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok regularly rack up millions of views. Carrasco’s calling is identifying synthetic media; he’s an AI detective, and dude is great at separating the real from the phony. He calls out AI-generated influencers:
discusses the difference between real and AI videos of animals on trampolines:
What do you think so far?
explains the difference between “deep fakes” and “AI videos”:
and points out videos that people think are AI, but are actually real:
The popularity of Carrasco’s content speaks to young people’s desperation to just know what’s real—a challenge that no other generation has ever faced. Carrasco presents some great tools for spotting slop, but sadly, it’s a Sisyphean task: AI content generation is only getting better, and the “tells” more subtle.
Viral videos of the week: AI or animals?
You might not be aware of the debate about AI going on among younger people online, because it’s being conducted largely through “Animal or AI” meme videos. Videos dramatizing this choice have tens of millions of views on TikTok. Here’s how they work: Over a music bed from Hamilton, these videos present competing clips of AI and animals, leading to an eventual conclusion where one is chosen over the other.
Animal choosers are in the majority by huge numbers, both among the videos’ creators and the commenters. The irony is that many of the clips that illustrate that animals are better seem to have actually been generated by AI.
