Brothers Playing Basketball With Their Dog

Submission 1,709

Part of a series on Facebook AI Posts Epidemic / Facebook AI Slop. [View Related Entries]

About

Brothers Playing Basketball With Their Dog refers to an AI-generated image from Facebook (amid the platform's AI Epidemic) in which two boys labeled "brothers" and a dog are posing with a basketball on a sidewalk. The younger, infant brother on the left side looks like a humanoid creature with no arms and a hunchback. The older brother in the center has no right foot. The creepy AI image became a meme in May 2024 after it was posted to Twitter / X. There, internet users turned it into an exploitable, re-editing and repurposing the oddly shaped brothers, specifically the infant homunculus brother whom some compared to a Smiling Friends character.

Origin

On May 7th, 2024, Facebook^[1] user Weird AI Generations posted an image titled, "Brothers playing basketball with their dog," showing two boys and a dog with a basketball. Over nine days, the post received roughly 2,400 reactions (shown below).

Spread

On May 10th, 2024, X^[2] user @yorokobitattoos tweeted a screenshot of the Facebook post, captioning it, "I keep almost deleting fb- this keeps me comin back," gaining over 34,000 likes in six days (shown below, left).

Users added viral replies to the tweet that added to the jokes, such as X^[3] user @beepbat on May 10th, 2024, who posted a screenshot of just the baby, writing, "I’m gunna have to go pee in the middle of the night and scare myself imagining this thing skeddadling at me in the dark thanks," gaining over 2,900 likes in six days (shown below, right).

On May 11th, 2024, X^[4] user @tippity quoted the post, saying, "That deformed baby looks like it would run really fast across the screen in Smiling Friends," receiving over 145,000 likes in five days (shown below, left).

Later on May 11th, 2024, X^[5] user @go_succ_an_egg tweeted a GIF that fulfilled @tippity's post, receiving over 57,000 likes in five days (shown below, right).

Reposts of the original image also went viral on Instagram.^[6]