The AI Cat Video Rabbit Hole
- David Dar '26
- Apr 21
- 8 min read
The seemingly endless pump of meaningless AI-generated cat content on the web gets stranger than you’d think.
If you’ve been on the internet any time within the past year, there’s a solid chance you’ve seen this video of a kid in tears while watching a feed of AI-generated cat stories. The video has amassed over 160 million views on TikTok (the original appears to be no longer available) and at least 22.8 million likes.
This video and its popularity aren’t an isolated incident— it’s a part of a larger trend of social media videos showing small children crying after watching AI cat videos. Plenty of other videos of Gen Alpha members bawling at the sight of cats in sad situations made the rounds on social media last year, like this one from the TikTok account @babyzachhh that has 83.2 million views and 2.7 million likes. Judging from the popularity of the videos these kids are watching, although obviously to a lesser degree, the spell they are put under isn’t exclusive to just children. Sentiments and questions like “made me cry,” “Why do these AI videos always make me sad,” “Why did I watch this,” or “This is proof that I will watch anything” litter the comment sections of AI cat videos.
There’s no strict classification for an “AI cat video,” but if you’ve seen one before, you likely understand what that label entails. Naturally, these videos are almost entirely AI-generated and prominently feature cats. They are generally glorified slide shows that flip between short animated or still clips to tell a story. Most of the time, they’re set to the tune of songs performed in high-pitched meow sounds (covers created by Bongo Cat), usually Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?”, but occasionally other songs like Rihanna’s “Diamonds,” Sia’s “Unstoppable,” or, when forgoing the meows, generic royalty-free options. These videos started to emerge early last year, primarily on TikTok, and since then, they’ve spread very far and accrued notable popularity across a plethora of social media platforms.
To give an idea, here’s one example of a popular AI cat video created by the YouTube channel MeowTube. The video, posted in March of last year, has over 65 million views and just under 2 and a half million likes. It is a still-frame slideshow of AI-generated images that tells the story of a cat gaining weight to give his father a life-saving transplant.
This TikTok video posted by user mpwild in December of last year has more than 102 million views and nearly 4 million likes, and in a series of animated clips, it depicts a frail-looking and insecure cat going to the gym after being bullied and becoming ripped.
One video posted on Instagram by the account mpminds_ (same owner as the previous account) in October of last year has garnered 223 million views and 15 million likes. The video features a recurring mascot of AI cat videos, Chubby, and his son in a story told through animated clips. The video starts with both being abandoned by their wife/mother, then facing poverty, and eventually finding success. His son graduates, then Chubby is immediately hit by a car and killed, and his son subsequently grieves and gets married.
These videos are just a few of the many AI-generated cat stories finding success across social media services. Judging from comments, videos of kids unable to look away, and the virality of these videos, to a certain extent, they have an undeniable pull over their viewers. That’s definitely owed in part to the protagonists of AI cat videos being cats (you guessed it), as they have a consistent history of being one of the most popular fixtures of internet culture. The psychological draw of cats has turned them into, as the New York Times once described, the “essential building block of the internet,” and has made them a prime candidate for AI personification.
Because these videos employ cats and don’t have to use language to convey their stories, they also have an undeniable universality that has likely significantly contributed to their popularity. As the owner of the Tales of AI Cats Instagram account puts it, “There is no need to know the language in the real sense. Cats are a common value in the whole world. Everyone loves cats. We all experience similar feelings in completely different countries. We have common pains and happiness. It is a niche that appeals to a very general audience. When you add some aesthetic elements like Pixar-style, it is impossible not to be successful.” On top of that, with most of these videos being backed by song covers that replace English with meowing, what would be a language barrier is effectively erased. That lack of language barrier, combined with easy-to-understand stories, makes these videos incredibly accessible and primed for internet success.
While cats and the lack of language are partially responsible for the immense popularity of AI cat videos, it’s important to take a look at what many of these videos have in common. Beyond just being sets of AI-generated images or clips that focus on cats, these videos frequently feature tragedies and other tropes with high emotional impacts. Through cats, these stories often cover topics like bullying, cheating, poverty, body dysmorphia, hospitalization, and pregnancy, among many other hardships and emotional situations. Those ever-present themes and the sight of a crying cat in every other AI cat video serve to hook people in and pull on the viewer’s heartstrings, hence the just as popular videos of children in tears at the sight of them. No matter how bizarre, tearjerker AI cat videos work because they tap into emotions to capture people’s attention.
“I try to come up with everyday situations and add unexpected twists — something funny, awkward, or surprising. But the stories that worked best by far were the emotional, sad ones,” says Charles, the creator of mpminds, who runs some of the most successful social media accounts in this space. “Those really resonated with people. I think what made my accounts blow up was the combination of cute cats and dramatic storytelling. That contrast hits hard.”
The newfound prevalence of this variety of content— not just AI cat videos but also other AI-assisted low-effort, low-quality social media posts— raises questions about what we value in and the future of what we consume on social media. To be clear, this content is low effort: here’s a video in the same vein as the ones covered that I made with minimal research, effort, and time, for free with a few AI tools.
To be fair to the producers of these videos, even if the content itself doesn’t require much work or skill to create, it still takes time to properly make an income from and stay on top of running social media accounts, especially when multiple accounts are involved. “While doing research [on building a social media presence], I discovered artificial intelligence and that content could be produced with it.” says Tales of AI Cats. “I researched free methods and tried them. Over time, I improved myself. … Honestly, it took me 4 months of just doing research to be ready to produce content.”
Digging a bit deeper, beyond concerns about the future of authentic internet media in the face of AI-generated content’s quick rise in popularity, plenty of these AI cat videos are already much more directly and outwardly harmful. Unlike the examples covered so far in this article, which are mostly just innocuous tearjerkers, plenty of these kinds of videos (mostly on YouTube due to differing content restrictions across social media platforms) include grotesque and gory visuals, seemingly directed at children. A search for “AI cat videos” on YouTube quickly leads to more of the same kinds of AI cat tragedies found on other platforms, as well as AI cat videos that feature much more abuse and gore, among other questionable topics and visuals. On a random search of the topic, one of the first videos that appears is over an hour long, features mind-numbing and rapid editing to hold short attention spans, and among the first several visuals in the video is a kitten being beaten with a chain while sitting in a pool of blood.
The rest of that video, seemingly stitched together from multiple shorter ones, includes more of the same blood pools, as well as other sights like a cat dying in a car crash, more than one cat being struck by a car, a helicopter crash, frequent ambulances, home-destroying disasters, and naturally, an evil plane. Sadly, this video isn’t an anomaly and is decently more tame compared to many of the other videos like it. When immersing yourself further into the depths of incomprehensible and overstimulating AI cat content, it’s not rare to find images that are, frankly, disgusting, gruesome, and downright horrifying at times. Blood, violence, and monsters with jarringly detailed teeth are very common. Recurring across a significant number of these videos is the theme of parasites gaping open small cats on hospital beds.
“I’m really not a fan of that kind of content,” says Charles, regarding the darker side of AI cat stories. “Even in my saddest stories, I always avoid showing anything explicit like blood etc. I know there’s a younger audience watching this stuff too, so I try to be mindful of that. Personally, I think it’s important to keep things emotionally impactful but still safe and respectful.”
The issue with all of the abuse, violence, and body horror of these YouTube AI cat videos is the fact that their target audience is seemingly children. One channel that, judging by its most recent videos, has had a field day putting out videos of cats with open stomachs and parasite infestations, features titles like “Kitten’s Tummy Trouble! Parasites from Ice Cream” or “Oops! This Little Cat’s Belly Is Stuffed with Sweets!”
This mother on TikTok made a video warning people who watch or take care of children to avoid allowing kids to watch AI cat videos because she found her son crying and afraid after watching a video of a cat battling parasites.
According to a 2020 Pew Research report, 80% of all parents with a child 11 or younger say that their child watches videos on YouTube, with 53% saying their child watches videos on YouTube daily. 46% of those parents also reported that their child has encountered inappropriate content on the platform. Inevitably, videos like these will fall into the hands of children, especially when they’re filled with cute cartoon cats, and that raises ethical questions about the inclusion of violent and scary topics and visuals.
Concerning internet content directed towards children isn’t new, but the AI-created version of it and internet media in general are, and we don’t know how they’ll shape the future of the Web or culture as a whole. AI cat videos are just the beginning of something much larger that we need to pay attention to, but what exactly that will be remains to be seen.
As AI becomes more powerful and its foothold in our culture increases, the internet is more and more flooded with mass-produced and effectively empty pieces of “art”. In the era of “shrimp Jesus” and various other forms of “AI slop,” these popular cat videos are just another offender in a new shift toward content that has less and less human involvement. Admittedly, many of these videos can be dumb fun, but it’s important to call into question what these videos mean for culture as a whole; as AI cat videos and their ilk continue to grab the views, likes, and attention spans of many, it’s possible genuine human expression on social media could slowly lose ground to rapidfire AI regurgitations.
“Criticisms usually come from those who are interested in art,” says Tales of AI Cats. “Of course, I will not defend that artificial intelligence is an art and that these works should be considered as works of art.” The matter of AI-generated content on the internet is a matter of the value placed on creativity. These cat videos, even if largely inoffensive and not meant for much more than to bring their producers a little extra income, take up room and attention in social media spaces that could be going to real artists and creators. As AI technology improves and the content created by it can fill more niches, human creators will likely struggle to compete online.
“Personally, I think it raises some important questions,” Charles shared when asked about AI-generated content’s growing prevalence on the internet. “We’re getting to a point where it’ll be almost impossible to tell what’s real and what’s AI-generated, and that’s definitely a bit scary. It’s exciting creatively, but we need to be careful about how it’s used.”