Tropland Universe posts photoreal lions, tigers, and jaguars doing things no animal could ever safely do — riding high wires, embracing ringmasters, headlining a circus — and every caption tells you the same two things: the animals are AI, and that's the point. The current era of the account is a serialized "Digital Animal Circus," and the caption formula repeats like a ritual: "No real animals were used in the performance. My videos are made with the help of AI," followed by a bolded line that no animal should ever be subjected to cruelty.
It's the project of Josh Gottsegen, an LA-based creative director who's been building this world since before image generators existed. His verified Instagram has passed 1.2 million followers and is still climbing, and Feedspot's list of top AI artist influencers has ranked him number one two years running. His site puts the full picture at 3.5 million followers across fifty countries and 2 billion content views — with a single video, a lion couple's wake-up call, accounting for 267 million of them.
It started as a juice bar book
The Tropland IP predates the AI wave by nearly a decade. Gottsegen wrote Joosh's Juice Bar, a children's picture-book series set in Tropland Forest, starting in the early 2010s — his site dates the IP to 2013. Then came The Adventures of Rockford T. Honeypot, a middle-grade novel about a bookish chipmunk, published in June 2020. In an interview from that book's release, he described the grind plainly: "From start to finish, it took four years. In between my real job of running my own creative / marketing company, it took about two years to complete the first draft."
He also wrote it chapter-by-chapter for a close friend recovering in the hospital, which tells you something about how he relates to this universe — it was never a content play first.
The books gave the AI something to render
When generative tools arrived, he didn't start from zero — he started from a fictional world with ten years of characters and settings. He was generating Tropland concept art with Midjourney as far back as 2022, telling LA Wire at the time: "Combining my previous stories with current projects in development, I can explore new levels of storytelling and get real-time feedback across social media. The Spirit Realm opens magical doors that didn't exist in my previous books but are very much a part of Tropland."
The current circus reels carry a fresher tool credit: they tag Dreamina, ByteDance's AI creative suite, where he's part of the creator-partner program. His founder page says he's collaborated with Meta, Adobe, OpenAI, Sora, Kling, and Topaz Labs — his claims, but consistent with a generate-upscale-edit video pipeline. What he emphasizes everywhere is the human layer: his brand-safety page states that Tropland "does not generate content autonomously" and that every piece runs through deliberate choices about narrative, composition, and emotional tone.
Run like an IP business, not a feed
This is the part most AI accounts don't have. Tropland has a licensing agency (All-American Licensing), a claimed library of over 50,000 visual assets ready for consumer products and apparel, a Patreon where members vote on where the story goes next, and a published brand-safety doctrine that rules out shock content and misleading AI claims — "Long-term IP integrity prioritized over viral reach," in his site's words. He even publishes an llms.txt documentation suite for AI crawlers, which might make him the first AI artist optimizing his press kit for the machines that will summarize him.
The animal-welfare framing doubles as the brand's heart. From one of his own captions in June: "Making these videos brings me joy. Every act in the Tropland circus, and not one animal caged, trained, or harmed."
Where it's pointed
The stated ambition hasn't changed since 2022: "I plan to expand my creative output utilizing AI art to assist in developing my future books, animated television series, and film storylines. It's been a dream for many years, and I feel I'm getting closer." An animated Rockford series was reported in development back in 2023; the short film above is the proof-of-concept that already exists. Meanwhile the circus keeps adding acts — a new impossible performance every few days, each one disclosed, each one harmless by design.