A teenager spent just 15 minutes and seven AI prompts creating a bizarre wooden drum character. Now, after the internet transformed it into a global sensation, lawyers are fighting over whether those few words were enough to make him a genuine creator.
Tung Tung Tung Sahur, also known as Triple T, has gone from an obscure AI-generated image to one of the internet's strangest stars, appearing in YouTube and TikTok videos that have attracted hundreds of millions of views.
The character has inspired fan art, animations and cosplay, while his likeness has appeared on plushies, perfume and stickers. Tung Tung Tung Sahur is now in Fortnite as a skin.
He might look goofy, with that wide grin and blank stare. But he raises a very real question: who owns a character created by AI?
Seven Prompts. 15 Minutes. Millions of Views. Now Comes the Legal Fight
At the centre of the dispute is an Indonesian teenager known online as Noxa, who created Tung Tung Tung Sahur in 2025 using OpenAI's image-generation tool.
The character is based on a kentongan – a traditional wooden drum used in Indonesia to wake Muslims for their pre-dawn meal during Ramadan.
Noxa turned the instrument into an anthropomorphic figure with a broad smile, human-like legs and an unsettlingly empty expression.
The character soon became part of the bizarre world of 'Italian brain rot' – a genre of surreal online videos featuring strange AI-generated characters with deliberately nonsensical names and stories.
But the joke quickly became big business.
The dispute has now reached a US federal court in California, where games companies are fighting with French creative agency Mementum, which represents Noxa, over the use of Tung Tung Tung Sahur in the popular Roblox game Steal a Brainrot.
Mementum co-founder Eben Jeda said the agency was created to help internet-native creators benefit financially from work that can otherwise become hugely successful without them seeing the rewards.
'Brain rot is one of the first highly visible manifestations of a much larger transformation: internet native creativity can now become global almost instantly, while the people who originate it can remain economically invisible,' he said.
But others argue that no single person should be able to control a meme whose popularity was created collectively online.
Fabian Mosele, a self-described 'Italian brain rot expert' who has made several Tung Tung Tung Sahur videos, said:
'There are a ton of creators who made these characters come to life. Before, they were really just images. Having been part of making the virality of these characters, to gatekeep it to the original prompter of this character doesn't seem right.'
The Bizarre Meme That Became a Very Real Business
Tung Tung Tung Sahur is now one of many characters in the Italian brain rot universe, alongside bizarre creations such as Ballerina Cappuccina, a ballet dancer with a coffee cup for a head, and Tralalero Tralala, a shark wearing sneakers.
Their popularity has created a surprisingly lucrative online ecosystem.
Do Big Studios capitalised on the trend with Steal a Brainrot, released on Roblox in May 2025. It quickly became one of the platform's most-played games.
But in September 2025, Spyder Games LLC and Speedy Simulator Gaming LLC – the owners of Do Big – received a cease and desist letter from Mementum over the use of Tung Tung Tung Sahur.
Do Big initially removed the character and attempted to negotiate.
The talks failed, and Spyder and Speedy sued, arguing that Mementum could not claim copyright over the AI-generated character.
'Mementum's claimed rights do not exist. Under established law, copyright protection requires human authorship, and AI-generated material does not qualify,' the complaint stated.
The case now pits the teenager who created the original character against the companies and online creators who argue that the wider internet helped turn it into a phenomenon.
So... Can You Actually Copyright an AI Creation?
US copyright law protects original expression created by a human, even when AI is used as part of the process.
However, a 2025 report from the US Copyright Office said protection does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or work where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.
The office did not set a clear rule on how much human input is enough. Instead, it said the question must be considered on a case-by-case basis.
That makes the details of Noxa's creation particularly important.
Court documents filed by Mementum in a separate trademark-related dispute in France show that Tung Tung Tung Sahur was created in roughly 15 minutes using seven prompts.
The instructions included: 'draw a pentungan sahur with a face and legs', followed by 'human face' and 'no hands, legs like a human, and a human face'.
Aaron Moss, a copyright lawyer representing Do Big through Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp LLP, said the argument is not that AI-assisted work can never be protected.
'We are not claiming in this case that AI-assisted work can never be owned by anybody,' Moss said. 'In a case where somebody makes real creative choices, there is human authorship that is subject to protection. But it's our position that sparse prompts – typing in a few words and picking [the image] you like – does not constitute human authorship.'
The stakes extend far beyond one strange wooden drum.
Tung Tung Tung Sahur's journey shows how quickly a seemingly worthless meme characters can become valuable intellectual property that spread across social media, video games and merchandise almost overnight.
And who deserves to profit from it.
If a human provides the idea, AI creates the image, and millions of people turn it into a phenomenon, who gets to say, 'That's mine'?
