Bart Simpson is giving everyone brainworms. AI Bart Simpson brainrot has exploded on TikTok and Instagram, and there is a very good chance you have already seen it. So where is all of this coming from? The answer is longer than the internet itself.

Even before the internet, meme-adjacent Bart edits were a dime a dozen. The early to mid 1990s belonged to Bartmania: Bart on every t-shirt, Bart banned from schools for being an underachiever and proud of it, Bart topping the charts with a rap single. And the tradition never stopped. It still lives on in bootleg Bart t-shirts, the most famous of which is themed around the Gulf War.

"The internet just inherently craves this little rascal archetype."

Throughout the 2010s the emergent popularity of the meme began to take on a very Bart-shaped silhouette. Say the line. Eat pant. Rat boy. Any number of 4chan references to very specific things that Bart has said. A lot of this was thanks to one website: Frinkiac, an internet database of every single quote and frame from The Simpsons. It made it trivial to find literally any quote you were looking for, and it single-handedly revolutionized Simpsons memes.

By the late 2010s Bart had become such a recognizable avatar of being cool and plugged in and online that there was even a brief and widely hated art movement: the sad boy emo rap Bart edit.

Then came the early 2020s. As AI began to broaden the horizons of what we consider a meme, people started digging up the oldest Bart images and artwork they could find and feeding it into the machine. If you have seen a Bartsona, that is brainrot. If you have seen Domer, that is Bart brainrot. If you have seen Homer let the Barts out, which is absolutely huge right now, that is Bart brainrot.

"This is actually not AI. This is a Photoshop piece from 2008 by the artist BP Kelsey."

But luckily a lot of the brainrot is still human-made. The image that seeded an entire micro genre of AI Bart slop edits is a 2008 Photoshop piece by BP Kelsey that someone randomly dug up. Even though the AI thing is worrisome, it is nice to see that some internet traditions just can't die.

Off the top of our heads: the Rizzler, the 21 kid, the 67 kid, the Walmart singing kid, the floss kid, Bart Simpson. They all have one thing in common. They are iconic little boys. Only one of them has been iconic for 39 years.