The Iranian Lego AI video creators credit their virality to ‘heart’ | The Verge
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The Iranian Lego AI video creators credit their virality to ‘heart’
Explosive Media is going up against the White House in a meme war.
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Donald Trump has spun the recent rescue of a downed airman whose fighter jet was destroyed behind Iranian borders as a resounding success. But the story is very different in one of the many viral, AI-generated Lego videos that have been produced by Iranian content creation group Explosive Media in the weeks since the US and Israel began dropping bombs on the country. In Explosive Media’s music video take on how things played out, the US military is a joke for losing multiple planes and helicopters, and spending “$100 million just to save one guy.”
The video’s shots of Lego jets exploding into $100 bills and golden coins reinforce the idea that the US is wasting taxpayer dollars just to be outmaneuvered by Iranian forces. And the accompanying AI-generated lyrics send a clear message about Iran being ready to do it all again if and when the US strikes next.
Explosive Media’s content plainly reads as propaganda. But the simplicity of its messaging has helped turn the group’s videos to a viral phenomenon. The videos are being shared across the internet, and people — many of them located within the US — are praising them for the way they humiliate Trump and urge viewers to remember that before this war began, the Trump administration was busy downplaying the president’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein. On Tik Tok, unofficial uploads of the videos have racked up thousands of comments from people cheering Explosive Media on and saying that their videos and surprisingly catchy AI songs are more informative than what’s being reported by Western outlets.
By playing into the public’s disdain for Trump and his peers, groups like Explosive Media are helping Iran win a meme-fueled war of ideas and perceptions. And at a time when the White House has tried to present itself as having a deep understanding of how to shape online discourse, it seems very much like the Iranians have Trump outgunned.
Explosive Media’s official You Tube and Instagram pages were both recently taken down — You Tube says that their videos violated the platform’s policies regarding spam, deceptive practices, and scams. But it’s not hard to find the group’s AI-generated shorts lambasting the US and Israel’s attacks on Iran. Even if you aren’t keeping up with news about the war, you’ve probably seen some of Explosive Media’s work while doomscrolling through X or Tik Tok. The way Explosive Media has been consistently putting out new videos almost every day that explicitly comment on recent events — despite the internet blackout — makes the group seem like it could be a large outfit with ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ content creation machine. This would make the group an extension of the same governmental organization that turned Iran into an authoritarian theocracy in which political dissent has been violently repressed.
But when I recently spoke with a member of the group via the Telegram channel linked in multiple Explosive Video accounts, they claimed that they are a team of about 10 people who are operating independently from Iranian state media. Explosive Media claims it sees maintaining its independence and being relatable to Gen Z (their peers) as important elements to achieving their larger goals. And the representative stressed that using Lego aesthetics to spread their message has been a key part of building a global audience.
“Lego is a universal language,” the Explosive Media member said. “It conveys messages easily, it’s playful, it doesn’t require extreme realism, yet it can include astonishing detail.”
Explosive Media’s latest videos lean into dark, absurd comedy as they depict the US and Israel’s heads of state as emotive minifigs. In one, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nervously draft a ceasefire request as the devil sits next to them with a grin on his face. After making fun of whatever is going on with Trump’s hands and taking a beat to draw a comparison between the children killed by the US strike on an elementary school in Minab and Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, the video cuts to a montage re-creating a number of the Iranian military’s recent successful attacks. Another video is addressed directly to Pete Hegseth, and uses an AI-generated vocal track that sounds a lot like Macklemore to make fun of multiple scandalous allegations about the sitting defense secretary having a drinking problem and sexually assaulting women that have been leveled against him.
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It is immediately clear that Explosive Media’s animations are made with AI. But their content feels different than most slop polluting the internet, and not just because the war is unpopular. Each video tells a cohesive story with clearly defined characters whose (general) visual consistency helps you follow their narrative arcs even if you aren’t watching with the sound on. Explosive Media maintains a running list of potential concepts that could be turned into videos, but each project begins with a script, which is used to generate AI footage and an accompanying song before it is all merged together using post-production software.
The member of Explosive Media I talked to explained that they are using generative AI “as a tool to present truths in a compelling way and to break through walls of censorship” that have negatively impacted the way people see Iranians. To the group, there is little difference between gen AI and any other kind of technology that “can be used for good or bad,” and they see their videos as prime examples of how dynamic Iranian storytelling can be.
“Western audiences have, for years, been fed distorted views of our nation by mainstream media,” the representative told me, referring to the idea that Iran is an undeveloped, uneducated country. “When we release these animations, Western viewers are initially surprised that such work comes from Iran. That’s when misconceptions start to shift—and that’s exactly what we aim for.”
Explosive Media’s content is far more polished and, frankly, interesting to watch than any of the White House’s trolling shitposts or the slop videos Trump regularly posts on his social feeds. But they are all reflections of the way that people are using AI-generated content to shape online discourse about serious real-world events. Part of what makes Explosive Media’s videos feel more resonant is the fact that, in addition to making fun of the US and its allies, they are imploring you to see Iranians as people with very pointed senses of humor who are fighting back against foreign threats to their nation.
By contrast, the White House has been using AI “memes” shared through official channels to punch down at its own population and make light of its draconian policies. When Trump posted a video of himself using a fighter jet to dump feces on No Kings protesters, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson insisted that the president was merely “using satire to make a point.” The point seemed to be the explicit dehumanization of Trump’s critics, which is one of the main reasons the US’s meme content feels different from what’s coming out of Iran.
When I asked whether Explosive Media sees its content as being in conversation with the White House’s social media posts, the representative said that they do not “compare [themselves] to those childish pieces” because “hands stained with innocent blood cannot create work that touches hearts.”
It’s not just that Explosive Media’s memes are more compelling — they highlight the larger problems the White House has had communicating about this war at all. The US’s messaging about why it’s attacking Iran and how much devastation the war is truly causing has been incredibly muddled. When Trump insisted to CBS last month that the US and Israel’s bombardment of Iran was “very complete, pretty much,” he was lying. The very same day in a separate speech, Trump said the US would “not relent until the enemy is totally and decisively defeated,” adding that the war “could go further.”
“Hands stained with innocent blood cannot create work that touches hearts.“
Since then, the conflict has raged on, Trump has threatened the whole of Iranian civilization with death, and a tenuous ceasefire has reportedly been violated by Israeli forces. The White House’s lack of transparency throughout the war has made it all but impossible to take anything said by governmental officials like Hegseth at face value. Hegseth has repeatedly overstated the effectiveness of the US’s operations against Iran, and the Pentagon has been accused of drastically underreporting military deaths and injuries.
As much as Explosive Media is trying to speak to ordinary people who might not think of themselves as being directly connected to the US’s participation in this war, the group also sees its current popularity as a teachable moment that larger, more established media organizations should be paying close attention to. The lesson here, the group’s representative insisted, is that legacy news organizations have a duty to “let the world hear the voice of the people” — especially those who are young and fighting for their lives.
But there are other things to take away from Explosive Media catapulting itself into the spotlight using gen AI. The group and others like it are crafting polished pieces of propaganda that are designed to speak directly to people outside of Iran (where The Lego Movie was never theatrically screened) using a familiar and accessible visual language. The videos’ playfulness and creativity have made them exactly the kind of content that thrives on social media platforms. And they make the US government’s sloppy attempts at controlling online narratives about this war feel slipshod at best.
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