When Memes Meet Metal: The Wild World of “BOI WHAT” and AI
If you spend enough time scrolling through internet culture, niche music forums, or TikTok, you might stumble across a phrase that sounds like a confused double-take: “Boi What.”
While “boi” on its own is a classic piece of internet slang—an alternate spelling of “boy” used for emphasis, jokes, or classic reaction memes like “O shit waddup, here come dat boi”—”BOI WHAT” has also taken on a completely different, highly specific identity in the digital age. It is the moniker of an internet-native music project that blurs the lines between human creativity, artificial intelligence, and chaotic nostalgia.
Who (or What) is BOI WHAT?
Far from being a faceless algorithm that generates songs out of thin air, BOI WHAT is the creative project of musician Eli Strobeck. The project gained viral attention—particularly across platforms like Reddit and YouTube—for crafting heavy, aggressive metalcore and deathcore music inspired heavily by classic cartoons, most notably SpongeBob SquarePants.
If that sounds like a bizarre internet fever dream, that’s because it is. But the way the music is actually made challenges a lot of assumptions people have about artificial intelligence in art.
The Human-AI Hybrid: How the Music is Made
There is a major misconception that projects like BOI WHAT are entirely “AI-generated”—meaning someone typed a prompt like “Make a heavy metal song about Bikini Bottom” into a machine and let it cook.
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