[jeroenhd]

Aside from the causal brony references, this project originally featured a lot of my little pony voices because it needed meticulously annotated transcriptions of the input audio to be trained well.

The extremely dedicated brony subculture voluntarily put in a lot of work to get a corpus for the AI to learn from.

There's also another factor at play: this AI works best with highly pitched voices, which my little pony is just full of. Not only did MLP provide such a generous source of training data, its results were also much more impressive than the dry dictation many other corpi would've resulted in, adding to its fame.

I personally haven't seen any significant rise in MLP references, though that could be because I don't know the show so I don't catch references to it. It's also very possible that you've caught the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.