Cute cat so sad so brave 😭❤️

Meow meow meowmeowmeow meow

Bet that title got caught in a few spam filters.

Last week I was somehow directed to a YouTube channel called Cat Cute Cat. It has 1.38 million subscribers. From the looks of it, all of its uploads are shorts featuring the same song—a kittified Sia track that might be partially AI generated. The clips are differentiated from one another by slideshows of AI-made cartoon cat pictures delineating various (but not dissimilar) narratives. In one of them, an orange cat loses in a boxing match to a gray cat, and the orange cat’s devastated son trains to be a boxer himself, and…well, who cares. It’s all slop.

But the boxing cats short, as of this writing, has almost 80 million views. My first question was: WHO THE HELL IS WATCHING THIS?

Then I noticed that it was uploaded a month ago. Right—click farmers and bots are watching it.

The Cat Cute Cat channel is the most frightful apparation of Dead Internet Theory I’ve ever seen. It’s really thrown me for a loop. I’m not quite yet a Dead Internet theorist—but I might subscribe to something more like Zombie Internet Theory. Or maybe: They Walk Among Us Internet Theory.

The comments on the boxing cat clip are rife with usernames that begin with the word “user” and are followed by random alphanumeric strings. Others consist of first and last names followed by three or four numbers. Most have default “capital letter” PFPs; a few have proper avatars. Their remarks are uniformly brief and generic:

• So cute I love this 1 like

• That is a strong cat❤️

• The song literally made me crying😢😢😭

• I love ANIMALS very much, I FEEL SORRY FOR THE GRAY CAT AND THE ORANGE ONE

• respect of dad👍

• Like por el gatito❤️❤️❤️❤️😊

• Ojalá el gato el papá gato tenga la vida eterna y su gatico siempre siga peleando por su papá❤️❤️

• Ха так мила и грустна

• I loove you😭😭😭😭😭😭❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

• 👇😢😢😢ai muốn khóc thì nhấn suốn đây nha

Are these bots, human workers at click farms, or very dull but sincere people?¹ I was inclined to think it was all bots and paid commenters—at first.

I did some clicking around. Some of these users have completely blank channel profiles—but then again, so do I, and I’m reasonably certain that I’m human. Others users have uploaded videos of their kids, assembled pop music playlists, and are subscribed to non-spammy channels, so they’re probably not bots. But that prompts the question—who are they? Obviously many (probably a majority) of them must be paid commenters, but what about the ones with anime avatars, coherent self-descriptions in their bios, and who joined the platform two, five, or ten years ago?

What does it mean that so many of them are uploading short videos of small children (presumably theirs)? Is it relevant to ask how many millions of overtired and/or dimwitted parents are navigating to this stuff on an iPad, shoving it into their toddlers’ hands, and going outside for a cigarette…?

On the original Bongo Cat video (the first appearance of the song, uploaded over a year ago), someone left the comment: “My Instagram feed is full of cat stories with this song.”² Some replies:

• Same every f**king day I see it and it is so sad [presumably speaking of the song’s mood?]

• Same they make me depressed but i just can't stop watching them😭

• My YT feed is too😂❤️

• Same but on yt shorts.

• the drafted cat soldier was sad asf

• Ai is life.

These videos are everywhere. There’s so many goddamn accounts uploading this shit on every major platform. Google “unstoppable sia cat” and see how many YouTube and TikTok results you get. It’s a meme.³ I have no idea when it began or who first thought of it, but it’s truly beside the point now.

And it might be a shade of things to come on a post-Millennial internet where the document is finally and permanently displaced by the video clip: this stuff isn’t being written about anywhere. Thousands (millions?) of people are exposed to it, and evidently none of them are bloggers, journalists, thinkpiece authors, or effortposters seeing an opportunity to document a bizarre internet trend. The Sia AI cat slideshow is an evanescent Happening.⁴

Here’s one called “MEOW Unstoppable,” from an uploader who has “only” 5.75 thousand subscribers (and after just seven months!). The format is exactly the same as Cat Cute Cat’s shorts—an AI cat slideshow paired with a lugubrious MIDI regurgitation of Sia—but this one has a mere 72 thousand views and 50 comments.

Some comment samples:

• Please make him happier each and every time😊

• That is the saddest video😢

• 😢❤️

• 😅😅😅😅unstoppable laugh

• vsf essa musica é muito boa

• IM 18 AND IT ALMOST HAD ME IN TEARS

Sincere human viewers—or users (human or bot) on a script?

Well: do we really suppose the uploader paid a click farm to give him fewer than fifty comments? And the number of phony replies must be less than fifty, since so many of the users posting them have proper PFPs, intelligible bios, uploads, subscriptions, and accounts that are at least a few years old.

It’s eerie: the comments left by the genuine users and the farmers/bots approximate each other pretty damned closely, don’t they?

I wonder to what extent the farmers and bots trying to pass themselves off as genuine, appreciative viewers actually condition the responses of the real audiences who stumble upon or are directed to these videos. For instance, if you reach the bottom of an interesting article from your favorite respectable news & opinion outlet and find that the reader comments are all one or two paragraphs, you might feel obliged to put a comparable amount of effort into your own contribution to the conversation. Or, conversely: the communities around irreverent “drama” message boards don’t don’t reward prolixity or seriousness, but rather put a premium on snark, shock, and shit-talking—and the newbie who doesn’t want to get laughed off the forum knows to follow the examples set before him.

On these AI-generated cat videos, you see scores and scores of “cute cats so sad n brave 😭❤️” comments—and so how do you suppose a human user responds after having read the room?

Flooding the world’s largest venue for public exhibition and discourse with AI-generated spectacle and robotic commentators is already shaping up to be one hell of a social experiment. When in Zombieland, are people generally inclined to do as the zombies do?

If the zombies learn to act human by imitating humans—and the humans take their social cues from the zombies—at what point does any distinction become meaningless?

That would be a monumental occasion in the history of technology: humanity at last becoming so alienated from itself through the protracted amputation and exteriorization of its capacities that it no longer glimpses in communications media the Narcissus image of itself, but rather recognizes itself as the reflection of the abstracted gaze from the screen.⁵

1. (1) One wonders how much longer human click farmers have before they’re all replaced by AI. The shitty thing is that it’ll mean lower overheads and higher profits for their sleazy dirtbag employers.

(2) or: what if they’re all children??

2. The video credits the meow-meow Sia cover to four people. There are three Vietnamese(?) names and several broken Instagram/Facebook links. The German(?) “vocalist” is a YouTuber with only 650 subscribers in spite of being linked to in the description of an upload with over a million views. Weird.

3. Or, perhaps more accurately, a counterfeit meme.

4. Prof McLuhan might say that in this respect it is intrinsically tribal, a recapitulation of a primary oral cultural modality.

5. The obverse of The Inversion:

At one point in 2013, YouTube had as much traffic from bots masquerading as people as it did from real human visitors, according to the company. Some employees feared this would cause the fraud detection system to flip, classifying fake traffic as real and vice versa — a prospect engineers called “the Inversion.”