The unstoppable rise of Chubby: Why TikTok's AI-generated cat could be the future of the internet
There have been many famous internet cats, but it's possible no internet cat has made more people cry than Chubby. Depictions of Chubby vary, but he is always rotund, ginger and AI-generated. He is almost always involved in a deeply sad or peculiar situation. And he has baffled, outraged and won over millions of people.
Content creators on TikTok and YouTube Shorts tell stories about Chubby and his family in wordless slideshows of AI-generated pictures. A recent video by the TikTok account @mpminds opens with Chubby and his child, Chubby Jr, dressed in tatters. Chubby holds a cardboard sign that reads "Will Purr Fro Eood" (AI image generators can churn out impressive graphics, but they're notoriously bad at rendering text). In the next images we see Chubby shoplifting from a grocery store, getting arrested by the police and leaving a distraught Chubby Jr to an uncertain fate. The last image shows Chubby behind prison bars, dreaming wistfully of his son. The video has over 50 million views and 68,000 comments, written in several different languages.
Chubby is far from alone. Similar content has flooded social media in recent months. In March, reports emerged that bizarre AI-generated images of Jesus made out of shrimp exploded on Facebook, baffling observers and racking up millions of views. The posts were so popular that many speculated the social media engagement was coming from networks of bots programed to pose as humans. But with this new genre of cat videos, it's clear the internet has turned a corner. There's no question that Chubby and his AI-generated feline friends are capturing real people's attention and emotions, en masse. It's raising new questions about the meeting of art and technology, and perhaps offering a vision of the internet's future.
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