(Credit: Tharon Green/ PCMag Composite;Aitor Diago/via Getty Images)
On September 13, YouTuber creator Forrest Waldron was excited to stream Steal a Brainrot. Since its launch in May, Steal a Brainrot has become Roblox’s most-played game, amassing over 24 million concurrent players. Users purchase and collect viral meme monsters: raccoon–fruit hybrids, sharks with shoes, and the like.
While streaming on his 14 million-subscriber YouTube channel Kreekcraft that day, Waldron noticed that Steal a Brainrot's cast was missing someone important: Tung Tung Tung Sahur, a wooden log man with bright eyes and a baseball bat who could be seen in the DJ booth during in-game concerts, had vanished.
Waldron immediately checked the game’s official Discord to find out why Tung Tung, a purchasable character, had been removed. “The character was just mysteriously gone, and nobody was giving me a straight answer,” Waldron tells me.
Some clarity came on September 15, when the France-based company Mementum Labs, which represents Tung Tung's Indonesian creator, Noxaasht, claimed on TikTok that Steal a Brainrot’s developer, known only as Sammy, had made “millions in revenue” using Noxaasht's character and that Sammy had removed Tung Tung after the company reached out to speak to his lawyer.
Two days later, Sammy wrote on his TikTok that he had to “delete” the character “do [sic] to copyright.” (Sammy, who is based in Brazil, and the Steal a Brainrot team did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) Fans were beyond furious. Noaxaasht’s comment sections were flooded with angry messages, wondering how someone could claim to own an AI-generated character.
It's a valid question. To clarify the situation, we spoke to Mementum and an intellectual property expert.
Are AI-Generated Creations Copyrightable? It Depends
Steal a Brainrot uses characters like Tung Tung that emerged from what’s known as Italian brainrot, a viral trend that started in 2023 as AI-generated videos of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson rapping nonsense with Italian slurs thrown in. Modern kids like the nine-year-old celebrity the Rizzler can spout off names like Bombardino Crocodilo and Ballerina Cappacina like past generations knew cartoon mascots or Pokémon.
Noxaasht had unveiled Tung Tung in a February 28 TikTok that has since amassed 120 million views. Tung Tung's name mimics the sound of early morning drumming intended to wake people for a meal during Ramadan. Noxaasht "experimented with several figures, blending together elements from kentungan (the traditional wooden instrument), fragments of text, and visual references to shape the character’s identity," a Mementum spokesperson tells us via email.
The spokesperson claims Mementum is just trying to protect an owner’s copyright. “Rather than issuing a takedown, we contacted their legal representative to initiate a conversation,” the spokesperson writes in an email. “We are still waiting for their answer, but the character disappeared from the game.”
The copyright status of AI-generated materials is a hotly debated topic. In 2023, the US Copyright Office determined that art created for the comic book Zaraya of the Dawn by AI image generator Midjourney could not be copyrighted. But in 2025, that same office issued a report that left things a bit more open-ended. So far, the Copyright Office has registered over one thousand AI-enhanced works.
Michele Robichaux, a digital and interactive media and entertainment attorney at North Carolina-based firm Odin Law, says that based on what the Copyright Office has said, AI-generated works like Tung Tung could be ineligible for copyright protection unless there is significant human involvement. “I think [the latest report] signals movement in the direction of protection for AI-generated works,” says Robichaux, “but there's a huge risk that we don't know what that threshold is.”
A Troubling Sign for Steal a Brainrot
Mementum says it has licensed Tung Tung to multiple games, including Pudgy Party, based on the NFT series Pudgy Penguins, and an official mobile game called Tung Tung Tung Sahur. “The idea is to build a system that respects the original author while allowing the culture to remix at a different scale,” the spokesperson says. (The CEO of Pudgy Penguins did not respond to a request for comment.)
Mementum provided us with a brief from its lawyer in France, Matthieu Quiniou. “The limited use of artificial intelligence tools (notably OpenAI) as a drafting assistant does not alter authorship nor diminish originality,” Quiniou claims. “French law clearly establishes authorship in favor of the natural person who conceived the work.” The 1886 Berne Convention ensures that foreign works are treated the same as domestic works in the US, but does not override US copyright law.
Sammy’s removal of Tung Tung is a troubling sign for Steal a Brainrot, as nearly every character in the game is based on outside AI-generated images. Robichaux says that, ultimately, the courts will have to decide how much human involvement in the creation of an AI-generated character is necessary to make it copyrightable in the US.
Creators using generative AI need “to understand that, unless they're also doing a lot of editing on their end, or can document and establish that there was a good amount of human intervention, they might not have an IP [intellectual property] that’s eligible for protection,” Robichaux says. “I don’t know if I’d want to put my eggs in that basket.”
Mementum describes Tung Tung's creation as very involved: "It actually took [Noxaasht] several days of prompting, remixing, and iterating with new ideas before he reached the version of the character we know today."
The Tung Tung Copyright Controversy Rages On
Since Tung Tung’s removal, Mementum and Noxaasht have posted multiple videos trying to get the character reinstated to the game. “They say AI memes aren’t real art, they deleted me from a game,” an AI-generated Tung Tung says in a recent Mementum TikTok. “No credit, no message, just gone.”
The videos’ comments are full of fans blaming Mementum and Noxaasht for the sentient log’s removal, unconvinced that the situation isn’t those parties' fault for getting a lawyer involved in the first place.
But not everyone seems that upset. “I think it's kind of funny,” Waldron says. “I never thought I’d be making Roblox news about the state of Brainrot copyright.”