If you’ve got kids under 12, you’ve probably heard them chanting “Tung tung tung sahur” around the house recently, asked what it means, and tumbled into an internet rabbit hole. If not, let me explain.
Tung tung tung sahur is one of many characters who've emerged from an internet culture called Italian brain rot, which emerged in early 2025 and has since taken over online spaces and physical playgrounds across the world.
These absurd, AI-generated creatures are have Italian-sounding names and are typically a mashup of two things that would never normally go together.
For instance, Ballerina Cappuccina is a dancer with a coffee cup for a head. Tralalero Tralala is a three-legged shark who wears Nikes on his, er, feet. Bombardiro Crocodilo is a crocodile crossed with a wartime bomber plane. You get the picture.
It's utter nonsense, but like a lot of utter nonsense, it's become big business. There are trading cards, a Panini sticker album, toys, Fortnite skins and a Roblox game called Steal a Brainrot.
And here's where things get relevant for anyone who's passed puberty. The latter has sparked a court case that could change what copyright means for anyone who uses generative AI in their work.
The subject of the case is Tung Tung Tung Sahur: a grinning wooden figure carrying a bat. It’s essentially an anthropomorphic rendering of the kentongan, a wooden drum beaten to wake Muslims for their pre-dawn meal, or sahur, during Ramadan in south-east Asia.
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The character was created by an Indonesian teenager, known as Noxa, using OpenAI's image generator. It became a global sensation, and now Noxa is represented by a French agency that specialises in this kind of thing, called Mementum (see what they did there?).
In September 2025, Mementum sent a cease and desist letter to the owners of Do Big Studios, the company behind Steal a Brainrot, over its use of the character. Do Big initially pulled the character, tried to negotiate a settlement, but when that failed they sued Mementum in a California federal court.
Do Big Studios' position seems watertight. In the US, copyright only protects work made by humans. A 2025 report by the US Copyright Office stated that you cannot copyright purely AI-generated material. There's some grey area, though: the same report said that work with sufficient human creative input might be protected, but would have to be considered on a case by case basis.
So how much human input went into Tung Tung Tung Sahur? Well, the character was literally generated about 15 minutes using seven prompts, starting with “draw a pentungan sahur with a face and legs”. Can me an old fuddy-duddy, but that doesn't sound like a lot of human input to me. But I'm not a legal expert, so we'll just have to see what the legal experts make of it.
Why it matters
And let me clear: the stakes are serious. If the court decides that a handful of prompts isn’t enough "human input" to protect creative work, that has big implications for how you make things for clients.
For example, if you create a logo, character or illustration for them partly or wholly using AI, that work might be unprotected. Which means, at the extreme, that the clients' rivals could copy it freely without any comeback. Which would beg the question what exactly the client is paying you for.
On the other hand, if the court finds that Tung Tung Tung Sahur is copyright-protected, that poses a lot of questions for clients employing freelancers and agencies who spend a lot of time painstakingly creating everything by hand. The idea that the client could make similar work themselves, just by a typing a few prompts, and still have it protected in law would make that option seem much more tempting.
Whatever the court decides, then, an entire profession of adults is about to be profoundly affected. Not bad for a teenager typing a few prompts into an AI bot.
Tom May is an award-winning journalist specialising in art, design, photography and technology. He is the author of the books The 50 Greatest Designers (Arcturus) and Great TED Talks: Creativity (Pavilion). Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine.