In April of this year, the electronic artist Gener8ion released a music video for his single “Storm,” directed by French filmmaker Romain Gavras and starring the rapper Yung Lean. The seven-minute video is set in the year 2034, at a boys’ school in Leeds where Lean starts some kind of revolution among the student body, smoking pipes and trashing equipment like he’s the protagonist of the video game Bully. The climax of the video, and the source of most of the attention since its release, is a two-and-a-half-minute dance sequence featuring Lean standing in the center of a formation of students, who all break out into a synchronized dance while he stands stoically in the middle of the “controlled chaos.” The precision of the sequence stands in sharp contrast to the loose feel of the earlier sections, paradoxically using rigidity and unison to create cathartic movement.
Upon release, the video drew immediate buzz for its ending sequence and choreography, receiving praise from the usual suspects like Charli XCX, while drawing in an unexpected crowd. I first noticed Josh Kushner tweet out a link to the music video, though he’s since deleted the post, and the only evidence I’ve been able to find proving that it ever happened are chats with Grok and this clip from the excellent Middlebrow podcast. From there, a flood of VC types began reposting the video on X and LinkedIn, praising the “humanity” of the ending sequence, seemingly being jolted back into reality by Damien Jalet’s mesmerizing choreography, even if for a brief moment. In the AI Slop era, the video represented an example of human achievement, something video-generative AI couldn’t replicate.
While I found the obsession by VC and tech types to be odd, I mostly dropped the line of inquiry until a few days ago, when I began to see dozens of AI-generated videos mimicking the ending sequence, swapping out faces and bodies while copying the movements. Some of the posts came from AI influencers trying to sell the prompt to recreate the video; others came from low-level creators looking to harvest the sequence’s meme potential. On X, some were upset about the theft of intellectual property, and others believe that the proliferation of the format is a sign of the original concept’s success. What was once regarded as some precious display of artistry and difficulty has been turned into fodder for the slop mill.
Some of the posts hopping on the “Storm” trend are crediting Higgsfield, an AI video-generation platform, as the machine powering the creation of these videos. According to an article in Inc., Higgsfield, founded in 2024 by Alex Mashrabov, has reached a $5.4 billion valuation as of August 2026 by courting small-to-midsize businesses that are strained for resources to use video-generative AI for their marketing and advertisements. While it’s not exactly producing visually stunning arthouse fare, AI-generated content has reached a point of “good enough” for those looking for easy ways to push their products out there.
In response to the “Storm” music video trend, Rachel Karten of Link in Bio astutely pointed out the speed and ease with which accounts are able to copy the work of others due to advancements in AI technology. Video- and image-generative AI has significantly reduced the costs of recreating mostly middle-of-the-pack content, which, for a small business looking to keep margins low, is good enough to fulfill its advertising needs. While this can occasionally backfire if your customer base cares about whether you use AI or not, the growing usage of Higgsfield and other platforms like it might dispel some narratives about people en masse being opposed to the usage of generative AI to supplant traditionally creative fields. Everywhere you look, restaurants are using AI to generate horrific images of their menu items, and all the bodegas have AI signage with ghastly menu items and even ghastlier font choices. None of these people are looking to push the boundaries of the visual medium, even if they’ve somehow concocted food images from faraway, more trypophobic realities — they just want a sign for cheap.
As the quality of image-generative AI continues to improve, hopefully that’ll prompt some of us to articulate a better argument against its usage other than the fact that it will never replace the quality of human work. While it may never reach the filmmaking heights of Jean-Luc Godard, it’ll become good enough for those of us who just want to advertise our sandwich special, and it’ll only get better from there. If it’s already good enough for your bodega guy, it won’t be long until it’s good enough for you.
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