“A good cat video is one with a tragic ending, a devastating one. The reason is, firstly, because I wanted to amuse myself; to put the cats in crazy situations. I also saw that sad videos generate more engagement because they elicit the compassion of viewers.” – Charles, a creator of tragic-ending anthropomorphized (humanized) cat stories which are highly successful on TikTok and which are made by artificial intelligence (AI).
You just provide the AI bot with full instructions and push the button and off it goes. Of course, these days you usually have to pay for the service but the finished result, although somewhat shaky in terms of the written text, is often fascinating and of high quality. A quality which could not be created by a person. You’d need a team of skilled animators to replicate these AI videos and images.
It is like magic. Almost instant magic. It is also dangerous and dumbing I would argue. What can happen is that AI turns in on itself and reads information that it has already written many times over. If this happens enough times you get ‘AI slop’. Rubbish essentially and a disintegration of quality. It is like humans or animals inbreeding. You get congenital deformities and infertility due to a lack of genetic diversity. It is unhealthy. I think AI is essentially unhealthy if used carelessly which arguably is happening at present.
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Cats were the engine for mass-produced memes years ago. Now they are back in fashion in AI-generated videos charming and upsetting the masses in tragic tales of, for instance, a ginger tabby cat who falls on hard times and ends in prison. The ginger tabby has been selected I believe because they are one the most popular cat types and they feature in some cartoons. They are almost synonymous with the classic tomcat – the unsterilized male street cat who survives against the odds.
It is not clear why the toddler is crying in the video as he watches a video of a ginger tabby kitten but it must be because the video is essentially sad and it works very effectively. Content creators are turning to AI to make entertaining videos sometimes of cats because they are always successful. The BBC reports that there’s been a surge in this type of content.
You might not know that thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands and more) of articles on the internet are written by robots – AI computers, which have acquired the information to write the stories by stealing it from websites that have been forsaken by Google. These sites are almost no longer listed by Google but they’ve been sucked dry of the information that they carry and discarded like squeezed oranges. It is the march of AI in all four corners of the internet changing it completely as I type this.
Some people – perhaps a growing cadre of internet users – believe that AI has already gone wrong. It is being used and abused arguably in an unhelpful way if we judge AI in terms of whether it improves humankind.
The comments under the TikTok video generally express bemusement as to why the toddler is crying. As mentioned, it can only be because he is viewing something that is sad and is a sensitive little guy. Humanized cats can be made through AI to live difficult lives mimicking the difficult lives of some people. This toddler might see the connection and he probably likes cats and/or animals anyway.
Cat meme
A cat meme is a humorous image, video, or text featuring cats, often accompanied by witty captions. These memes typically play on the natural behaviors, expressions, or exaggerated personas of cats to evoke humor. Originating on the internet, cat memes have become a widespread cultural phenomenon. They are shared widely on social media and often use recognizable formats or phrases. The humor in cat memes is usually relatable, light-hearted, and universal. And importantly they are shared and modified over and over again. It is the repeatability of the original that makes it a meme.
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