What's with the Explainer Girlies?

It takes a long time to research anything. Even longer to format the results into an article people would actually read. I’m jealous of today’s topic: Short videos that explain in steps how things are made or operate, starring animated women stylised in crunchy pixelated 3D polygons which arrive unexpectedly in your feed and seemingly don’t take that much work to produce. It’s a more compelling proposition than this article, a long read about how someone you’ve never met feels and you’ve had to go out of your way to find it, after inexplicably taking hours to write. Today’s trend doesn’t have a name yet, so I’m going with Explainer Girlies. They’re girls who explain stuff. If there’s ever a boy that explains things or a girl in this style that doesn’t explain something, we’ll reassess*.

The construction-focused sinaboto was the first of these that fell onto my feed, teaching the viewer all about industrial projects and breaking the process of improvement down to the seemingly obvious decision-making that, nevertheless, took human civilisation millenia to implement. Not a new concept for TikTok content, but the first to be served in a kind of false video-game, Megaman Legends-y style. The videos will present something like building a bridge, and then a technological leveling up which solves the problems inherent to the previous step’s design. Adding more stability, creating a way to still let ships pass below, that sort of thing.

The inventions aren’t bogged down in the realities of expense, procurement, or planning permission (scratching the same itch as a show like Dr. Stone, which in its later seasons is about re-creating the necessity of globally interdependent trade infrastructure from scratch, but this time everyone’s nice about it). That kind of simplicity is satisfying, like, if only it could just be this easy, we’d all be doing it. It’s also a bit like Primitive Living content, where weird structures are (purported to be) made by hand with just the stuff lying around and without having to get the council involved.

There’s also heavy use of a retention-focused style of online storytelling I now recognise every time I see it, where a thread stays gripping through the introduction of new problems while addressing whatever’s just been brought up. It satisfies the need for resolution, but still presents another wrinkle to focus on. Basically, these things are as morish as a sleeve of Oreos.

I don’t just get why people like this kind of thing; I mean to point out it’s a whole genre of entertainment at this point.

Initially I just wanted to share how weird these videos are, but during the (long, sadly essential) research I discovered the feelings of 3D modeller and video creator evanciao, who has been credited with special thanks on the profiles of many of these accounts, but doesn’t have the nicest of things to say about them.

sinaboto’s page released their first video on the 13th October, joined by the much darker tone and content of yurinasama on the 20th. There's kingpinrin, who covers crimes like money laundering and who released two videos in just 12 hours, and yuki.science who talks about science in a kind of annoying nervous baby way.

Both sinaboto and yuriasama's bios mention each other, and they follow each other (along with a handful of Umamusume-fan accounts), which I gathered means they’re probably from the same creator. The sheer amount of content provided in such a small timespan was the first sign that these videos are being produced far too quickly to be unassisted - unless there’s a massive backlog or a team behind it - and that something weird was going on.

evanciao released a response to these accounts (while this article was already in the works), and believes the model of sinaboto is based on an existing 3D model of theirs (“they just hue-shifted the hair”) made for a previous video. Evan discovered this stuff through a Discord message from a fan of their work, and initially hoped that the sinaboto account was someone making 3D animations with the model by themselves, but because of their familiarity with recent AI models like Opus 5.5 and GPT 6, suspects it isn’t.

“The whole reason that this channel blew up, it’s because it’s basically gooner content”

The 3D file for the neto character was given away in full with anyone basically able to do what they wish with it, but with credit. Evan, through the course of the video, shows he’s not happy with the “cringe” sexualisation present in these explainers, finding it forced, given how the model isn’t intentionally provocative in the initial work.

I can’t source this quote, but I heard someone say recently that whenever you find out that something was AI, the first reaction is often to feel like you’ve been tricked somehow. Best case, you don’t really think about it that much, but there’s not that many people who would be actively impressed to learn that something was produced with AI.

I reached out to Evan to get a little bit more background. He selflessly responds over a series of Discord messages while otherwise dealing with the response to the just-released video. I was interested to get his take on the creative process, as someone who produces their work by hand, now part of a conversation on content that likely uses AI tools as a large part of the workflow. He says that “Game development kickstarted 3D modelling as a hobby for me, and it is actually responsible for a lot more than that in my life” and that “My first encounter with 3D modelling was with a program called fragMOTION; it could export directX models compatible with the old game engines I was using (3D Rad). I learned Blender sometime around 2022. That was around the time I had taught myself C# and tried Unity. I wanted to start crafting my own stories, and art was what I was missing to bring them to life.”

He cites “Okamiden, Metroid Prime Hunters and even The World Ends with You” for the Nintendo DS as sources of inspiration, that have “Pragmatic art directions, made to fit the hardware” and says “I think there's something so incredible about artists being able to cram engaging and complex scenes onto hardware so limited.

I ask about AI, and get a more balanced answer than I’m anticipating “I think it's amazing in the sense that for a computer to even generate something like this is baffling. It's pure sci-fi, and from a technical point of view, mind-blowing.” He continues: “In reality, I think that people have lost faith in what they're capable of making, and in the volume of what they're required to make. Every day the bar rises higher; AI is not optional in some workplaces, and you are forced to stride further and further to keep up.”

It's hard to tell how many of these Explainer Girlies are produced by the same creator, or whether this has evolved into a truly stochastic trend, but all using Evan’s model as a base. I ask how he feels about what’s next if this continues as a much larger trend: “Hopefully people interested in my work can trace back to me. as for the ai content growing, maybe real animators get invested in my models and start creating genuine content that is better than automated educational tiktoks with anime girls. hoping for the best possible outcome I can imagine out of all of this.”

Explainer content isn’t new. AI content isn’t new. The combination of Explainer AI content isn’t new either, with people happily indulging in the slop of the I’m curious how songs - and I've personally been sharing weird content like this with friends for months (because it sucks!), so I recognise the style of writing in steps from videos like the ones that tell you how to make a Chinese spear.

So why do I bring this up now? I think it's entirely timing. This girlie content is very much the next level up from something which already exists, and seemingly only possible to produce at speed because of the advancements in AI. This kind of content is usually just cynically hacking the brain's knowledge-seeking pathways in order to maintain a high retention rate, and I think we're at the cliff face of a new method of adding novelty to a video style that the audience is already overly familiar with.

And I say cynically because these types of channels aren't really all that interested in being educational. Educational content is just an easy justification for why this video would be made. The aim is the growth of the channel; What else would they do? Would a dance montage have the same retention? Would sketch comedy open itself up to criticisms of writing quality?

For balance, I also think it's too comfortable to write this content off as having no value and adding little to the medium itself; sinaboto videos have a moment where she'll check the mail and see comments from the video, a kind of writing that understands retention is only one part of video growth and engagement is just as important, but finds a way to call out for it without being intrusive. The change in tone for yurinasama videos show that abstract global systems can be as interesting to break down in this format, and there's an understanding of how to produce a satisfying video loop from the clicking on and off of the light at the beginning.

Personally, I think it matters that these videos are currently sitting on TikTok without any kind of AI tag, should the accusations be completely accurate. The platform readily provides users with the ability to disclose this during upload and the platforms have a responsibility to address this if they’re going to be taken seriously as actually enforcing any of this tagging at all. (I ask Evan about this too, and he says “Platforms should, in theory, protect their creators by filtering automated content from genuine content.”) But I share this because it’s really the first time I’ve been genuinely worried for the future of the medium. AI video content was incredibly easy to write off in the Will Smith Spaghetti phase, and again in the dull hyper-realism era (at high expense for the privilege) in the previous year. As pointed out in Evan’s video, the models have finally gotten cheap enough and stylised enough, with the ability to blend in pre-existing project files, that I increasingly worry for my own relevance if this is just the current state of the competition, let alone the peak of it.

The content simply is good enough for a large enough percentage of the audience (even if I don’t count myself among them). I think these videos, should they be truly produced overwhelmingly with AI tools (I have reached out to sinaboto for comment and have yet to receive a reply), are some of the first tests of whether the audience cares about this kind of content being ethically sourced.

I just feel like it’s hard to compete with the speed and quality of these animations in the mediums that I’m comfortable producing in myself, and there are so so many years left in my career. If you’d like to prove me wrong, that there’s still an audience out there for work like mine: Here’s how.

Hello! This is a newsletter from Mat Jones. By day Mat works as the Senior Social Producer at IGN. Mat’s writing stuff like this every week(?) about the kinds of emerging things that people are doing online, or increasingly, how they’re bringing online stuff into the real world. Subscribe if that’s your kind of thing.

*A day later I did discover a channel that's very much in a different style, but it's still an AI Explainer channel hosted by a guy.