These Poorly-Drawn Pokémon Will Win Your Heart with Their Derpy Simplicity

Ely Bulnes • Writer and Editor

Mar 5, 2025 11:30 AM EST

Sometimes, less is more. You've all likely come across the now months-old TikTok trend wherein people demand that AI generate increasingly cuter images until the end product is a surreal nightmare. Usually, someone writes a simple prompt: "Can you make an image of some kittens?" Once the picture is generated, they ask to make the picture cuter, resulting in kittens with larger, cartoonish eyes. The prompter demands over and over that the kittens be made increasingly cuter, the cutest in the world, the cutest in the universe.

With each iteration, the AI generates images with more "cute" items crammed into the frame as well as cats with more exaggerated and realistic features. The end result is usually far from what anyone would consider cute. It is interesting that the algorithm tends to react with maximalism when asked to make something "cuter," when in reality, a lot of the most adorable characters tend to be quite simplistic. Take Sanrio's characters Hello Kitty, Pompom Purin, and Pochaco, for example, or JellyCat plushies, which are just mundane objects with simplistic faces. Apparently, this phenomenon even applies to Pokémon. Scroll down to be won over by @otiksimr's derpy doodles.