The last days of cute pet videos on the Internet

/ Alex Good

This never happened.

For decades now (has it been that long? it has) it’s been remarked that funny/cute pet videos are what drive the Internet. Cats behaving badly. Dogs being lovable. Such moments were what short-form videos seemed made for even before TikTok and Instagram.

Because people were spending so much time filming their pets there was no end to this content: pets interacting with toddlers, pets being shamed for destroying apartments, pets defending their owners from real and imagined threats, pets giving their owners the side eye, pets upset at going to the vet, or pets just soaking up the love and making goofy faces when people say their favourite word. And to this list we could add animal videos in general, because animals are great and there seems to be a nearly inexhaustible supply of such content.

But today an inexhaustible supply is no longer enough. The algorithm demands even more cute pet videos, and that they be even cuter. What to do?

Well, never fear because AI has come to the rescue. And yes I mean that ironically. About a week ago I noticed that a number of short pet/animal videos were showing up in my feeds that didn’t seem quite right. And a few that were not right at all. A pair of dogs stopping a grizzly bear from mauling a woman on her front porch? A gorilla defending a zookeeper from a jaguar? How was that even possible?

It isn’t, and it never happened. Just after I started noticing this as a trend a friend of mine who knows how fond I am of Newfoundland dogs sent me a cute YouTube short that had a little girl scolding a Newf for eating her cookies. It was even tagged as a “Heartwarming & Cute Moment!” But while it looked pretty realistic I figured it wasn’t real from a couple of tells. And that was before seeing that the “creator” was something called “Infinity Viral 7.”

The floodgates have truly opened for such AI slop, which isn’t surprising. Our content is being scraped and fed into the AI harvester in order to train it, but what’s even more disturbing is the way the algorithms are training us. It knows what we want to see and so it gives it to us, only in an exaggerated, more sugary form that will give us an even bigger dopamine hit and leave us clicking for more.

As for authentic cute-pet videos, I’m sorry but they’re not going to be able to compete.

To which you might say: so what? The Internet is a firehose of misinformation and we’re all just swimming in it now. But even acknowledging that I still find these animal and pet videos upsetting. Moments that are truly magical and unique, that meant something to people, are just being turned into chum that deadens us to what is natural and real. What these slop videos are doing is taking what is a healthy human response and using it to jerk us around. I find it sad, and more than sad, to read the comments on obviously fake “Heartwarming & Cute!” videos from people saying how moved they were by them. How damaging is it to them to realize that they haven’t been moved but been used?

But then, how many of those comments were written by bots? Just as AI now writes college papers and marks them too, AI makes YouTube videos and writes its own comment threads.

Of course AI has an even worse social impact when it takes the form of political slop and porn slop, but the psychological effect of the end of authentic cute cat videos might actually be something worse. And please don’t be one of those people who think you can’t be manipulated by this trash. I assure you, you can. You can and you are. We all are. Even when the videos are marked as being generated by AI we’re still clicking on them. They’re still pushing our buttons. They’re still training us, and leading us into a deeper epistemological crisis. What will happen when what’s authentic is no longer “real” enough to warm our hearts?

16 thoughts on “The last days of cute pet videos on the Internet”

  1. I will admit that I’ve been ‘caught out’ a couple of times by AI cat videos pretending to be real – and it’s not a nice feeling, – so I’ve stopped clicking on any of them, there’s so much of it about now, (and not just cute pets). I kind of don’t mind the ones that say they’re AI and make me laugh.

    But yeah, AI is ruining reality.

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  2. I fully agree with your thoughts here. Humanity is destroying itself and preparing itself for a kind of world wide slavery that we’ve never seen before.
    Stock up on the classic books, before those get ai’ized too…

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      • Really? That’s what you’ve heard? I’ve heard that it’s not less political but that the politics have changed. The enemy now is capitalism and corporations. I don’t know about the “more fun” part. But what’s the difference between this and Snow White, which didn’t bother you? As the Fixx said so well, “One thing leads to another.”

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      • It sounds terrible, and the clips I’ve seen do make it seem more like a Disney/Pixar bit of kidult entertainment than a political allegory.

        From early reviews sampled at Wikipedia:

        Variety: “Serkis’ 21st-century update dilutes Orwell’s political allegory in favor of what passes for something more ‘audience friendly’: His approach adopts the celebrity voices, cutesy character designs and antic, mile-a-minute energy of big-studio American toons.”

        Deadline: “a screenplay, alternately funny and frighteningly perceptive”

        IGN: “In toning down the more graphic elements of its descent into totalitarianism and simplifying the depths of its commentary, the director and performance-capture pioneer trades a dystopian tone for something a little more uplifting. It’s a fun movie with some creative visual choices and a great cast, but it’s also hard not to feel like it lost some teeth on its journey from the page to the screen.”

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      • “frighteningly perceptive.” So what if it slips its message in unobtrusively; that’s how this game is played. And of course aiming the thing at kids is par for the course. But yeah I agree it sounds terrible.

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  3. “What will happen when what’s authentic is no longer “real” enough to warm our hearts?”

    Porn has been paving that road since Deep Throat and look where we are now. And all of this produces huge cultural shifts which obviously you can see plainly so it’s weird to me why I keep seeing the occasional comment that the culture war is overstated or overrated. I’m sorry, but it’s not. Where do you stand on Skate Canada refusing to send its athletes to Alberta because Alberta actually understands reality?

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    • I do think a lot of the culture wars stuff is overstated. I mean, I hadn’t even heard of the Skate Canada thing you mention and I had to look it up.

      I don’t agree with trans athletes competing in female sports, at least in most cases I can think of. And there are other issues on the more radical progressive agenda that impact me more directly and that I’m even more strongly opposed to. I don’t like it when issues, particularly “identity” ones that may have some real basis, get turned into a grift. It even makes me mad sometimes. But I think there are bigger problems out there.

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      • Hey, if you’re not bothered by Canada’s immigration policies…. I mean, I know you guys are super into multiculturalism, but I also know there are many Canadians waking up to the fact that there’s a line even so. And you’re fast approaching it.

        The thing about culture is it’s in everything and it’s everywhere. You pay attention to all the connections and you realize what a behemoth it is. I guess that’s why I see it as such a big issue. Because…well, because it is.

        But like I say, if it doesn’t bother you……Oh, crap, who am I kidding? It may be another country, but it bothers me anyway. I don’t want to lose the Great White North, ey? : -)

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      • Actually, our immigration policies have been tightening up quite a bit. It was just reported that we had the largest quarterly population drop ever recorded in our history from July to October of this year.

        Ah Canada will keep going, in one form or another . . .

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      • I’m actually not happy to hear that. If the projections of Canada’s foreign born population aren’t due to ongoing policy (and I see you’re right about that) that means the damage has already been done. Combine that with a typical Western infertility and you guys really *are* in trouble.

        But of course if existence “in one form or another” is the measure…well, now I understand why you believe the culture war is overblown. By that standard, culture really doesn’t matter much, does it? Globalization rules!

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