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(AI generated) (Credit: @mpminds)
An AI-generated tear-jerking video of a cat has garnered millions of views and a loyal following, blurring the line between spam and art. Is it an algorithm or what the internet wants?
There are many famous internet cats, but perhaps none have made as many people cry as Chubby. Depictions of Chubby vary, but he's always plump, red-haired, and AI-generated. Chubby is almost always caught up in very sad or strange situations, and he has baffled, outraged, and won the hearts of millions.
Content creators on TikTok and YouTube Shorts tell the story of Chubby and his family in wordless, AI-generated slideshows. A recent video by TikTok account @mpminds begins with Chubby and his child, Chubby Jr., dressed in ragged clothes. Chubby holds a cardboard sign that reads “Will Purr Fro Eood” (AI image generators can produce impressive graphics, but are said to be poor at rendering text). In the next image, Chubby is seen shoplifting at a grocery store and being arrested by police, leaving a distraught Chubby Jr. behind to an uncertain fate. In the final image, Chubby is seen longingly dreaming about his son behind prison bars. The video has garnered more than 50 million views and 68,000 comments in various languages.
Chubby is not alone. In recent months, similar content has flooded social media. In March, reports emerged that a bizarre AI-generated image of a shrimp Jesus had exploded on Facebook, baffling viewers and drawing millions of views. The post was so popular that many speculated that the social media backlash was due to a network of bots programmed to pretend to be human. But it’s clear that this new genre of cat videos has marked a turning point for the internet. There’s no doubt that Chubby and his AI-generated feline friends are garnering a ton of real people’s attention and emotion. It raises new questions about where art and technology meet, and may offer a vision of the internet’s future.
Tail Sophie Cats
A variety of technological, economic and cultural forces have come together to make the AI cat the internet's newest star (AI-generated) (Credit: @talesofaicats)
In most videos, cats are placed in dire human situations: Chubby Jr. is bullied at school, Chubby is addicted to cigarettes, the cats are drafted to go to war, and for the past three months, nearly every video has featured an AI-generated cover of Billie Eilish's “What Was I Made For” as background music, with the lyrics replaced by meowing sounds. Before that, an AI-generated meowing cover of Sia's “Unstoppable” was the standard.
“I don't want people to know this made me cry,” was a typical comment from @relatablecutecats (160,000 followers) in a TikTok post about Chubby Jr. failing a test at school. “Of all the things going on in the world, this makes me sad,” commented another viewer of the video of Chubby Jr. being snatched by a pigeon while eating McDonald's with his dad.
AI-generated cat stories are objectively weird. They're also wildly popular and more than a little controversial. But whether or not Chubby is what people are looking for online, this is what the internet is serving us – for now, at least. The only question is, why?
Cats and new media: a perfect combination
Cats have always been at the center of digital culture, whether they're sulking, tapping on keyboards, or meowing. Jessica Maddox, a professor at the University of Alabama and author of The Internet is for Cats: How Animal Images Shape Our Digital Lives, says cat content is a hit not just because it's cute, but because “cat images are flexible, and you can give them any meaning you want.” In Victorian times, “people would write letters in cat voices or print photo plates of cats to share with friends,” Maddox says.
As meme culture took hold online, cats were a natural fit. And as technology advanced, pet lovers began using artificial intelligence to generate cats from photos of cats. The rise of free and widely available AI generators like Midjourney, ElevenLabs, and DALL-E has completely changed the look, feel, and landscape of the web. With powerful tools now in the hands of anyone with an internet connection and enough courage, these AI generators have spurred the rapid blossoming of new genres of online content.
Cat imagery is malleable. We can make cat imagery mean whatever we want it to mean. – Jessica Maddox
“I started it in January 2024,” says Charles, creator of the popular @mpminds account, who declined to give his full name to protect his professional reputation. “I saw another account making AI-generated photos of cats. It's not the same content, but it has a similar vibe. I remixed it and made a story out of it, and created the characters Chubby and Chubby Jr. So maybe there was a little bit of an idea for it before I made it, but I followed it and customized it and made it into what it is today.”
Many creators are following in the same footsteps, using AI tools to remix existing culture in the same way that other internet users talk about movies, music, politics, etc. “I knew there was a possibility to make money on TikTok and I saw that AI-generated content was quite popular,” says Charles, who works in finance in France. “I tried different ideas before the cat videos, but it was the cat videos that really took off, so I stuck with them.”
“Many people are unaware of how AI is integrated into social media, both in terms of features and shareable content, and may be unknowingly sharing popular social media posts generated by AI,” Maddox says. But as AI-generated content proliferates online, she says there is also more and more “backlash.”
The Hello Kitty Controversy
Users and researchers have noticed a rise in what they call “AI slop,” low-quality content generated in large quantities using AI generators. The most famous example is perhaps the “Shrimp Jesus” study from early 2024, in which researchers from Stanford and Georgetown University documented a network of AI-generated spam accounts on Facebook. These accounts posted AI-generated surreal images dozens of times a day, garnering hundreds of millions of likes and views. One of the AI-generated posts was reportedly among the top 10 most-viewed posts across the platform in Q3 2023.
Producers of this type of content can earn money by signing up for the platform's monetization program or by directing viewers to external links or services. They can also make money by teaching others how to create content using AI. As The Washington Post reported, creators of AI cat stories are selling courses teaching students the best ways to grow their followings and make money.
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The more dire the AI cat's plight, the stronger the reaction from social media denizens (AI-generated) (Credit: @mpminds)
“AI allows us to do this at scale, so why not give it a try?” says Renee DiResta, former research director at Stanford University, which conducted the Shrimp Jesus study. The volume and speed at which AI generators allow spammers to post means they can more easily target moving viral targets. DiResta says that spammers and scammers using generative AI also take advantage of social media algorithms that are better at recommending content than evaluating its accuracy or relevance. In 2023, at the same time that AI-generating tools made it easier for spammers to create large amounts of content, Facebook reportedly improved its algorithms to serve users more content from accounts they had never interacted with before. This, combined with an inadequate system for labeling AI-generated content, created a perfect storm.
Sad videos generate more engagement because they elicit sympathy from viewers – Charles from @mpminds
One way to interpret the rise of AI-generated content is to see it as the result of social media algorithms themselves. Algorithms on sites like Facebook and TikTok filter billions of data points a day and then evaluate that content with automated programs, many of which involve AI. In addition to managing the flow of content on their vast networks, the preferences of these algorithms actively shape that flow, determining what will go viral and what won't. AI-generated content can succeed by strategically considering first the preferences of the algorithms and then the preferences of human audiences. “Machines are creating content for machines,” says DiResta.
But machines still need creative input from actual humans. “I believe AI-generated content can be art,” Charles says. While AI image generators do much of the work compared to the efforts of a human illustrator, it's still up to creators like Charles to come up with the ideas and themes — it takes about an hour to make one cat story video, he says. And by any measure, Charles has seen dramatic success, both in terms of likes and views, and viewers' emotional response. “The person generating the AI content plays a key role in the outcome,” he says.
But is it art?
“My initial reaction was pretty much, 'What is this? Why?'” says Daniel Chartier, a painter who first came across the AI cat's story on TikTok's For You page. “I went through the five stages of grief and finally came to terms with it. It's upsetting to know that I'm truly sad.”
For Chartier, whose work often focuses on animals, imperfection is a key part of AI Nekomonogatari's aesthetic. Images of Chubby and other cats are largely inconsistent, with outfits and fur patterns changing and backgrounds shifting dramatically. But despite the AI generator's inconsistencies and occasional hallucinations, he says Nekomonogatari remains compelling because it's “shocking.” “I love that you can get immersed in these characters, despite everything else being goofy. It seems like you can't get emotional making something like this, but sometimes it works. The contrast is great,” Chartier says.
Tail Sophie Cats
Cats have always been the most meme-able icons on the internet. AI is a natural evolution (AI generated) (Credit: @talesofaicats)
Charles agrees: “A lot of the good cat videos have tragic, tragic endings because, first of all, they put the cats in crazy situations to entertain themselves. Also, we find that sad videos get more attention because they elicit sympathy from the viewer.”
The shock of feeling a real emotional response from an apparently AI-made video seems to be one of the main reasons people want to see bad things happen to Chubby: In the comments sections of many of the AI Cat Stories, users report that they came across these videos after seeing another viral video posted in June by TikTok user @b.ajasiii of a toddler crying after watching an AI-made cat video.
The video has been viewed 173 million times and was reposted by Billie Eilish, whose song is featured in many AI Cat Stories, sparking a trend of other TikTok users filming their young children's reactions to the Cat Stories. “That was the big moment for[the AI Cat trend],” Charles says. “I was already trending before that, but[the video]really boosted my account.”
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As AI-generated images continue to flood the internet, these cats may be a vision of the future (AI-generated) (Credit: @mpminds)
But many aren't happy about the trend. One creator who goes by the name of Tommy Guacamole made a video mocking people's reactions to cat videos. He said that while it's funny how easily these cat posts can manipulate our emotions, “I think AI content is trash and it's really ruining the internet.”
AI Cat Stories doesn't try to hide the fact that it was made with AI. Both TikTok and YouTube require creators to label AI-generated content as such, and cat content accounts generally follow this rule. Some even state that they're AI accounts in their usernames or bios. But the fact that it's AI-generated doesn't seem to stop it from tugging at viewers' heartstrings.
“I'm not sure where this project is going,” Charles said. “For now, I'm just going to keep posting content as is and see what happens.”
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