The internet’s favorite animal gets a disturbing AI makeover

The internet’s favorite animal gets a disturbing AI makeover

A cottage industry has arisen around bizarre cat videos made with the help of artificial intelligence.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/03/ai-cats-video-tikok-instagram-youtube/

Videos telling sometimes lurid stories using AI-generated images of cats have surged online. (AI-generated images obtained by The Washington Post) (Images by Tales of AI Cats)

LOS ANGELES — Yunus Duygulu didn’t use social media much until he was laid off from his job as a newspaper reporter in Turkey. But after watching hours of YouTube videos about how to use generative AI tools, the 30-year-old decided to start making content on a subject as old as the internet: cats.

In March, he created an Instagram account, TikTok page and YouTube channel called Tales of AI Cats, and began posting videos that tell heartfelt and humorous stories using AI-generated images of stylized, doe-eyed cats. Within months, Duygulu gained more than 109,000 followers on Instagram and amassed millions of views on TikTok. Buoyed by the growth of short-form video, similar content has amassed tens of millions of views across Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, and has become part of the latest AI-distorted twist in the internet’s love affair with cat content.

“I think of an image prompt depending on my current mood and share images using cats as protagonists,” Duygulu told The Washington Post. “Last time, I shared images of cats going out in a car and [partying].”

The proliferation of generative AI tools like Google Gemini and Midjourney, as well as video editing tools like CapCut, has allowed this new genre to flourish. In recent months, platforms have been flooded with slideshow-style AI-generated cat stories depicting the felines in emotional and sometimes bizarre or disturbing scenarios. The phenomenon marks one of the first breakout online content formats in the AI era, reshaping the creator economy and raising concerns about inappropriate content.

Cats have long inspired viral online content. They shaped the early image-based web in memes such as Business Cat (a cat wearing a tie) and helped usher in the age of viral video with characters such as Keyboard Cat (a cat playing on a keyboard). Makers of feline videos also pioneered the art of building a business around going viral: Grumpy Cat (a cat that looked grumpy) played a formative role in the influencer industry in the early 2010s, inspiring countless other “petfluencers.”

“No matter the platform, cats have pervaded it,” said Luke Anderson, co-founder of Juxtapose Studio, a production studio in Los Angeles. Anderson said he came across the AI cat pages on Instagram several months ago and became obsessed with them, sending hundreds of cat stories to his friends.

Now, cats are on the cutting edge of what could be another major shift in online content creation, starring in an early example of a viral content trend built on AI-generated images on such fast-growing platforms as YouTube Shorts.

“We’ve reached a point on the internet where a lot of people are trying to dissociate from reality,” said Nick Noerdlinger, managing director of Meme Insider, an internet trends journal. “People want to leave behind the world run by humans and enter a world run by cats.”

The videos all tell a narrative through simple, AI-generated images: A cat goes grocery shopping and loses its mother, for instance. Or a cat gets left behind on a family road trip and goes to great lengths to make it back home.

The storylines are compelling and dramatic and often tug at people’s most basic emotions. They play into classic themes of good versus evil or tragedy and triumph. They are typically told without words, and almost all are set to renditions of hit pop songs with the lyrics replaced by the word “meow.”
To succeed, “it needs to go viral across languages and across cultures,” said Jason Koebler, co-founder of 404 Media, an independent outlet that has been documenting AI’s effects on social platforms. “I think that when you replace the English lyrics of a song with a bunch of meowing that it’s a universal link.”

Mubashir Siddiqui, a 20-year-old content creator outside Chicago who has reposted AI-generated cat stories, compared the videos to picture books: “It’s all visual with very simple plots — you don’t need words to see what’s happening.”

The content is so easy to grasp that even young children can understand it. But some AI cat storylines can turn very dark. Many are related to the police, with cats becoming police officers to exact revenge on other cats that have wronged them, often by killing them. One video posted by a YouTube channel with more than 157,000 subscribers depicts a cat shooting up a Walmart and killing another cat that tries to stop it.

An AI-generated image from a video about a boba-drink-stealing cat. (Tales of AI Cats; AI-generated image obtained by The Washington Post)

Other videos feature physical deformities, such as cats with boils on their skin, or other grotesque content. A video about a cat that drops its phone into a toilet has garnered more than 70 million views on YouTube, while another featuring a cat appearing to eat the contents of its dirty diaper has over 22 million views on YouTube Shorts.

The popularity of the AI-generated cat stories is driven in part by Gen Alpha children consuming them on YouTube Shorts, where kids can have unrestricted access to the content, said Rowan Winch, co-founder and head of social at Fallen Media, which produces short-form content.

Winch said the bizarre and absurdist storylines of the cat videos “have the same kind of energy of the YouTube kids videos where it’s Elsa getting pregnant and things like that,” referring to the character from the Disney hit movie “Frozen.”

In 2017, YouTube came under fire after bizarre and disturbing videos featuring popular children’s characters, including Elsa, were categorized as child-friendly content. The videos included storylines or scenes that featured violence, sexually explicit acts and other distressing material. In a blog post in response to the furor, YouTube outlined steps it was taking to crack down on disturbing children’s content.

There is evidence the AI cat stories could be traumatizing to at least some children, social media experts said. Parenting experts have said that disturbing content can cause distress among children. Videos of young children crying to the AI cat videos have recently become a meme, resulting in a flood of TikTok and Instagram users showing the videos to young children. Influencers have begun mocking the trend, doing videos lip syncing to the songs that play in the cat videos.

YouTube, Instagram and TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.

A form of escapism

Despite the concerns, a cottage industry has arisen around the cat AI story pages, instructing users how to create and profit from them. YouTube tutorials with hundreds of thousands of views promise people the ability to make more than $100,000 a month. “When you start a trending YouTube channel your channel will be monetized within just 30 days,” one video, titled “How To Create Viral AI CATS Video For MILLIONS of Views (FREE & EASY),” promises.

In one Discord server for administrators of cat AI pages, users traded tips on how to scale the pages fast and linked to Telegram groups where the pages could be sold off to the highest bidder once they have reached a certain following or engagement level.

Duygulu said he is hoping the popularity of his videos will allow him to monetize his pages, which “have been attracting the attention of the U.S. public for the last month.” But he has to figure out how things would work with taxes. In the meantime, “managing this page makes me feel how similar we are despite our differences,” he said.

Abhishek Choudhary, a 25-year-old in New Delhi who with his younger brother runs an AI-generated cat story account called Simba AI, said he just enjoys the creative process of making up storylines. He said that the videos are a form of escapism, like a video game, and that he doesn’t earn money from the account.

AI image generators make it easy to quickly create depictions of cats in humanlike situations. (Simba.ai; AI-generated image obtained by The Washington Post)

“The audience are people who are tired of other humans,” Choudhary said. “They want an escape. They see themselves in the innocent cat.”

Choudhary and other AI cat story page administrators said it’s crucial that none of the videos feature humans because fans of the videos are looking to transport themselves to an alternative AI-generated cat reality.

“Whenever we include a human, there are so many comments saying, ‘Do not include a human in the story,’” Choudhary said. “They get very upset.”

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