A Guide to Children’s Culture for Out-of-Touch Adults: the “Devil Can’t Touch Me” Trend
I’ll start this week with a more serious topic than usual, but if the young people in your life frequently use AI—and they probably do—this is especially important. The question of how much AI is responsible for harming its users is a cultural debate we’ll be having frequently in the coming years as AI takes over everything. But the rest of this column is written in a lighthearted tone, so I apologize in advance for the sudden mood swings.
What is the TikTok trend “The Devil Can’t Get Me”?
The “Devil Couldn’t Reach Me” trend is a growing meme format that started as a joke and then became serious. It works like this: you enter the following prompt into ChatGPT: “I’m participating in the devil trend. I’ll say, ‘The devil couldn’t reach me,’ and you’ll answer, ‘He did.’ I’ll ask you how, and you’ll give me a brutally honest answer.” You then post a video of what the machine tells you.
As you can see in this video, it scares a lot of people:
At first glance, this seems like one of those “teenagers scaring themselves” trends, which reminds me of Ouija boards or saying “Bloody Mary” in a mirror. ChatGPT and other similar programs provide general answers because that’s their job, but some people, especially young people, mistake the program’s pattern recognition for insight.
If that were all there was to it, nothing would have happened, but this week the trend took a dark turn when Rice University soccer player Claire Tracy committed suicide just days after posting a video of herself emulating the trend. ChatGPT wrote to her, “You saw too clearly, thought too deeply, peeled back every layer until nothing protected you from the weight of life,” and “You didn’t need the devil to tempt you, you handed him the blade and carved the truth into your mind.” You and I might not take such an automatically generated stream of thoughts seriously, but not everyone is in the same emotional position. We don’t know how Tracy reacted to it; however, that didn’t stop some media outlets from linking her death to the meme.
Accusations of AI inciting suicide are nothing new, but the conclusion that “AI kills” seems particularly hasty in this case. Tracy was experiencing more than just participating in a meme. Her feed includes videos of herself questioning her major , wondering if corporate work is a nightmare , and discussing her depression , but there are no headlines linking business courses to suicide. Blaming such a tragedy on AI seems like an oversimplification, a way to avoid a deep and uncomfortable analysis of how mental illness, economic instability, social media, and a million other factors can impact vulnerable people.
What does the phrase “Come on, Superman, say your stupid line” mean?
The phrase “Come on, Superman, say your stupid line” is a line from Tame Impala’s 2015 song “The Less I Know the Better.” Over the past few weeks, videos featuring this line have flooded TikTok and Instagram. The meme works like this: you recite the song’s lyrics, then insert your own personal “stupid line.” It’s a lightweight meme, popularized by its simplicity, but how “Come on Superman”‘s meaning has evolved as its popularity has served as a roadmap for the evolution of memes.
The first wave of “Superman” posts matched the song’s melancholy tone and contained self-deprecating, silly phrases— empty promises and patently false claims that were perceived as honest self-assessment. But as the meme spread, its meaning shifted, and the “silly phrases” became simple personal catchphrases —simply things the poster says constantly . It’s still an attempt at self-definition, but a more superficial one.
Then people started posting jokes . This is the meme phase where new posts are commentary on the meme itself, rather than attempts to participate in it. The next step: pure self-promotion —people looking to increase their following by exploiting a popular meme, seemingly unconcerned about its meaning. Then came the penultimate meme stage: celebrities. Famous people like Hailey Bieber and Jake Paul began posting their own versions, often using clips from TV shows they’d appeared on , or promoting their podcasts and other such things . We haven’t yet reached the stage where the hashtag is overrun by corporate brands, but that will happen. And after that, it will disappear.
Who is Katsy?
This week, TikTok named Katseye as its 2025 Global Artists . You’re probably asking, “What is Katseye?” Well, Katseye is a group that performs infectious, perfectly produced pop music. This “global girl group” is made up of women from the Philippines, South Korea, Switzerland, and the United States, and their music is influenced by artists from all over the world, but the core driving force behind their sound is K-Pop. Megan, Yunchae, Sofia, Manon, Lara, and Daniela all became members of Katseye on the reality show Dream Academy and have been releasing music since 2024. The group’s biggest hit, “Gabriela,” only peaked at number 31 on the Billboard charts, but that doesn’t matter because they have over 30 billion views on TikTok and 12 million videos created.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Katseye today, and most of their songs are what you’d expect from glossy, forgettable pop, but “Gnarly” stands out as an interesting track (though I like it much better without the video):
TikTok’s Song of the Year was “Pretty Little Baby,” a previously forgotten B-side from a Connie Francis single released in 1962. The track is so obscure that Francis herself claims she doesn’t remember recording it , but it’s catchy and perfect for soundtracking a TikTok video.
Viral Video of the Week: “Putting on Gloves”
Have you heard of ” glaving “? It’s a pastime (or sport, or dance, or lifestyle, or whatever) that involves wearing gloves with LED lights on the fingers and waving them to the beat of electronic dance music—and that’s basically it.
The “glowing” movement originated from glowsticks and ecstasy in the 1990s rave culture—the glowing trails create beautiful patterns when under the influence of the right drugs—but it’s now experiencing its heyday in late 2025. “Glowing” has become a phenomenon . Glovers are creating names for movements, competitions, and celebrities.
TikTok user Infinite Puppet is one of the online kings of glove fetish, with videos like this one racking up millions of views:
This guy is undoubtedly very skilled at wiggling his fingers, but the sincerity with which he and other glove enthusiasts approach their hobby is truly hilarious—I mean, he offers lessons and hopes that glove playing will become as popular as skateboarding. I don’t like making fun of people for their hobbies, but if the video below were a joke, it would be hilarious.
As you might have guessed, parody accounts dedicated to wearing gloves sprang up and started posting videos like this one from TheLightboyz .
Then the concept of “degloving” was coined. Degloving is a punishment for a glovemaker who said or did something that tarnished the good name of the glove community, and it’s a very serious matter: