If you've watched a baby casually demolish a five-foot birthday cake, a golden retriever ordering at a drive-thru, or a tiny fisherman reeling in a whale — and wondered how any of it was made — it's AI-generated video. Here's the plain-English version of what's behind it.
Every clip in this category comes from an AI video generator: you type a description ("a golden retriever in a drive-thru window, ordering fries, cartoon style") or upload a photo, and the model renders a short video from scratch, frame by frame, based on patterns it learned from enormous amounts of real video during training. There's no camera, no animator, no CGI rig — the video is generated the same way a chatbot generates text, just predicting pixels instead of words. That's also why the clips are short (almost always 4-10 seconds) and why the same handful of visual quirks — slightly wrong hand poses, jewelry that warps, text that comes out as gibberish — show up across completely unrelated videos: they're artifacts of how the model works, not mistakes a specific creator made.
A small number of companies build the underlying models. Almost everything circulating right now traces back to one of these:
One of the earliest, most established players — strong editing tools (extend, restyle, swap elements) on top of generation, and a dashboard that now also hosts other companies' models (including Kling and Seedance) alongside its own Gen-4.5.
Leans into playful, easy-to-reach effects (style transfer, object swaps) on top of standard text/image-to-video — a common starting point for people who want something fun with minimal setup.
Built by Kuaishou (a Chinese short-video company); widely used for physically plausible motion — this is the one you've probably seen credited on a lot of the more "how did they animate that" clips.
ByteDance's (TikTok's parent company) video model. Newer to most Western creators' radar, mainly because it's typically reached through a developer API or a third-party playground rather than one single consumer app.
Google's model, reached through the Gemini app, Google Flow, or Vertex AI. Known for genuinely convincing native audio (dialogue, sound effects, music) generated in the same pass as the video — the reason it's behind a lot of the AI ASMR trend specifically.
Every one of these tools supports two basic workflows. Text-to-video starts from nothing but a written description — good for a completely invented scene or character. Image-to-video starts from a photo or illustration you upload and animates it — this is the workflow behind most of the "recurring character" content (the same AI baby, the same cartoon pet) you see posted repeatedly, since it's far easier to keep a character looking consistent across clips when you're animating one fixed reference image rather than re-describing it from scratch each time.
Runway, Pika, Kling, and Veo all work on a credits-per-generation model layered under monthly subscription tiers, roughly $8-$250/month depending on volume, resolution, and which company's tiers you're looking at, plus some kind of free allowance to start. Seedance is the exception — it's usually pay-per-clip with no subscription at all, often under $2 per 5-second clip. The short version: expect a single clip to cost somewhere between a few cents and a couple of dollars once you're past the free tier. For the full breakdown by tool, see our AI video generator pricing comparison, or jump straight to the cheapest way to just try it if you're not ready to commit to a plan.
If you know which trend you're chasing, we've got dedicated guides for the biggest ones: the surreal "character eating giant or unusual food" genre, the "giant hand saves tiny world" rescue format, AI ASMR (soap cutting, glass-breaking, kinetic sand), the AI action figure trend, AI pet portraits, and the "Italian Brainrot" animal-hybrid genre. If you'd rather understand the mechanism than the tool names, see how AI video generation actually works. Otherwise, pick a tool from the pricing or free-tier comparisons above and just try a prompt — every one of them lets you generate at least a couple of clips before you have to decide whether it's worth paying for.
One more step people don't expect
Once you've generated a clip you like, the video itself still has its full rendered background (and, on tools with native audio, sound) baked in — there's no "export transparent" button in Runway, Pika, Kling, Seedance, or Veo. If you want to pull just the character out to composite onto something else, layer it into an edit, or turn it into a sticker or overlay, that's what RemoveGifBG does: upload the MP4 it exported and get a transparent result back, processed frame by frame. See the AI video background remover guide for how that works.
See the AI Video Background Remover
Related: What is generative AI? · AI action figure trend · Tiny-world rescue trend · AI ASMR trend · Pricing compared · Cheapest way to start
There's no single app — most of what circulates on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram comes from one of a handful of AI video generators: Runway, Pika, Kling (from Kuaishou), Seedance (from ByteDance, the company behind TikTok), and Veo (from Google). All of them turn a text description or a still photo into a short video clip, typically 4-10 seconds.
No. The consumer versions of Runway, Pika, Kling, and Veo (via the Gemini app) are type-a-prompt-and-click web apps, the same shape as any other web tool — no software to install, no editing skill required. Seedance is the outlier: it's typically reached through a developer API or a third-party playground rather than one polished consumer app, which makes it a slightly less beginner-friendly starting point than the others.
Most tools support image-to-video (animating a photo you upload) and require you to have rights to that photo, with extra restrictions around real, identifiable people and especially minors. Read the specific tool's policy before uploading a photo of a child. A fully AI-generated or illustrated character — which is what most of the recurring viral "AI baby" and "AI pet" accounts actually use — sidesteps the issue entirely.
Every major tool has some free way to try it — a one-time credit grant, a small monthly allowance, or daily login credits — but free output is usually capped at a handful of short, watermarked, lower-resolution clips. See our cheapest AI video generator guide for the exact free-tier numbers, and our pricing comparison for what it costs once you outgrow free.