The most popular animal on the

internet gets an unsettling AI makeover

 

 

 

 

 

The production of strange cat films using AI has given rise to a little economy.

Yunus Duygulu was not a big user of social media until he lost his job as a correspondent for a Turkish daily. However, the 30-year-old made the decision to start creating content on a topic as old as the internet : cats after spending hours watching YouTube tutorials about how to utilize generative AI tools.

He started the Tales of AI Cats YouTube channel, TikTok page, and Instagram account in March. He then started making videos on these platforms that use artificial intelligence (AI) to create stylized, doe-eyed cats to tell funny and poignant stories.

Duygulu received millions of views on TikTok and more than 109,000 Instagram followers in a few of months. Encouraged by the rise in popularity of short-form videos, related content has accumulated tens of millions of views on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, contributing to the most recent AI-distorted evolution of the internet’s infatuation with cat videos.

“I share images with cats as the protagonists and think of an image prompt based on my current mood,” Duygulu said in an interview with The Washington Post. “The last time I posted pictures, I showed cats going out and [partying] in a car.”

This new genre has been made possible by the widespread availability of generative AI tools such as Google Gemini and Midjourney, together with video editing tools like CapCut. AI-generated cat stories in the style of slideshows have been all over the internet in recent months, portraying cats in poignant, occasionally strange, and unsettling situations. The phenomenon is altering the creative economy and generating worries about improper content. It represents one of the first breakthrough online content formats in the AI era.

Cats are the source of many viral internet videos. With characters like Keyboard Cat (a cat playing on a keyboard) and Business Cat (a cat wearing a tie), they helped create the early image-based web and ushered in the era of viral videos. The concept of creating a company around a viral video was also invented by creators of cat films. Grumpy Cat, a cat with an angry appearance, was a pioneer in the influencer market in the early 2010s and served as an inspiration to a great number of other “petfluencers.”

“Cats are everywhere on platforms,” stated Luke Anderson, a co-founder of Los Angeles production business Juxtapose business. Anderson claimed that he grew enamored with the AI cat pages on Instagram after discovering them a few months prior and began forwarding hundreds of cat stories to his pals.

With their early role in an early example of a viral content trend based on AI-generated photos on rapidly expanding platforms like YouTube Shorts, cats are currently at the forefront of what may be another significant shift in the development of online content.

“Many people are attempting to separate themselves from reality on the internet these days,” stated Nick Noerdlinger, managing director of the online trends publication Meme Insider. “People want to live in a world run by cats and leave behind the world run by humans.”

Every film conveys a tale through simple, AI-generated images. One, for instance, depicts a cat that goes food shopping and laments the loss of its mother. A cat may go to great lengths to find its way home if it gets lost while on a family road trip.

The tales are affecting, captivating, and frequently touch on people’s most fundamental feelings. They have a connection to traditional themes of redemption and tragedy or good versus evil. Most of them are performed wordlessly, and almost all of them are put to popular song covers with the word “meow” substituted for lyrics.

To succeed, “it needs to go viral across languages and cultures,” says Jason Koebler, co-founder of 404 Media, an independent news outlet covering artificial intelligence‘s effects on social media. “I believe there is a universal connection when a song’s English lyrics are replaced with a bunch of meowing.”

The videos are similar to picture books, according to Mubashir Siddiqui, a 20-year-old content creator from outside of Chicago, who has shared AI-generated cat stories on social media. “It’s all visual with very simple plots  you don’t need words to see what’s happening,” he said.

Even young children can learn the material because it is so simple to understand. However, some AI cat narratives have a dark side. Numerous cats have ties to law enforcement; they become police officers in order to get revenge on other cats that have harmed them, frequently by killing them. A cat is shown shooting up a Walmart and killing another cat that tries to stop it in a video uploaded by a YouTube channel that has more than 157,000 subscribers.

Other films have horrible material or physical defects, including animals with boils on their skin. On YouTube, a video of a cat dropping its phone into the toilet has received over 70 million views, and on YouTube Shorts, a video of a cat that looks like it’s eating its filthy diaper has received over 22 million views.

According to Fallen Media’s head of social media and co-founder Rowan Winch, youngsters can watch the AI-generated cat stories on YouTube Shorts with no restrictions, which has contributed to their appeal. Fallen Media creates short-form video.

Referring to Elsa from the popular Disney film “Frozen,” Winch remarked that the strange and absurdist plots of the cat films “have the same kind of energy of the YouTube kids videos where it’s Elsa getting pregnant and things like that.”

When strange and unsettling movies with well-known children’s characters, including Elsa, were labeled as kid-friendly entertainment on YouTube in 2017, the platform faced backlash. There were narratives or sequences in the videos that dealt with sexually explicit activities, violence, and other upsetting subjects. YouTube responded to the uproar by outlining the measures it was taking to clamp down on objectionable content for minors in a blog post.

According to social media specialists, there is proof that the AI cat stories may have traumatized at least some children. According to parenting experts, youngsters may become distressed by upsetting content. Recently, recordings of young kids sobbing to AI cat movies became viral, prompting a wave of TikTok and Instagram users to show the films to kids. Influencers have started making fun of the craze by recording videos in which they lip sync to the music included in cat videos.

Requests for comments from TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube went unanswered.

a means of escape

Despite these reservations, a small business offering users instructions on how to construct and monetize cat AI tale sites has emerged. People who watch hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos are promised the chance to earn over $100,000 every month. One video, titled “How To Create Viral AI CATS Video For MILLIONS of Views (FREE & EASY),” claims that “when you start a trending YouTube channel your channel will be monetized within just 30 days.”

Administrators of cat AI pages were connected in a Discord channel where members exchanged advice on quickly growing their pages and provided links to Telegram groups where the pages could be auctioned off to the highest bidder after a predetermined number of followers or engagements.

Duygulu stated that his pages “have been attracting the attention of the U.S. public for the last month,” and he hopes that the success of his videos will enable him to monetize them. However, he needs to ascertain how the tax system will operate. “Managing this page makes me feel how similar we are despite our differences,” he stated in the interim.

Abhishek Choudhary, a 25-year-old resident of fresh Delhi, said he just enjoys coming up with fresh tale ideas. He and his younger brother co-own the AI-generated cat story account Simba AI. He stated that the films are a form of escape, akin to playing a computer game, and that he is not compensated from the account.

The audience, according to Choudhary, is made up of people who are tired of other people. They are trying to find a way out. They relate to the innocent feline.

Choudhary and the other administrators of the AI cat narrative page stressed the importance of keeping humans out of the videos since the goal is for viewers to become fully immersed in an alternate AI-generated cat reality.

“There are a lot of comments saying, ‘Do not include a human in the story,’ whenever we include a human,” Choudhary remarked. “They become really agitated.”