From its conception, cat content has been the internet's bread and butter. But in the age of AI, nothing is what it seems.
Case-in-point: the TikTok account TailBitPets. On the surface, it looks like any other cat account. It focuses on the (mis)adventures of tabby cats Loki and Max.
The majority of the videos involve the adventurous felines "sledding" down the stairs and snowboarding on top of a hill in plastic containers.
Several videos of this kind of antics (during which the cat seems to carry the container up the stairs himself) have clocked up more than a million views, with the most popular video amassing a total of 18.8 million views.
In turn, the cumulative like count on these videos is 2.8 million, and the account itself has 42,800 followers.
However, there are concerns that these videos are AI-generated. This much is evident from the comments across the account's most popular videos.
"I hate AI"
"Basically, anything amazing cannot and will not be believed any longer," one user wrote. "I hate AI."
"I wish this wasn’t AI," another added. "There must be a cat out there somewhere in the world that does this.".
While a third declared, "I'm gonna cry if this is AI."
Elsewhere, a fourth couldn't get over their shock at "the number of people who believe these videos."
According to some commenters, there are some telltale signs that these videos were AI-generated. In one comment on a snowy sledding video, specifically, a user pointed out that there was zero snow in the basket and no paw prints in the snow.
Other users highlighted things like a pet's tail length changing in each video, distorted text, and one cat's startling ability to jump backwards.
It should be noted that AI-generated videos on TikTok are meant to indicate the fact that they are made artificially, but this barely happens in practice.
This has happened before
Multiple so-called 'wholesome' TikTok accounts have been exposed as being AI-generated as of late.
In late 2024, Basin Creek Retirement Village, which went viral after sharing a pun-filled Halloween video, turned out to be entirely AI-generated. This included every supposed senior citizen who appeared in the videos.
Moreover, back in August, TikTok users went into a meltdown after a video of bunnies jumping on a trampoline went viral: a video which, once again, turned out to be AI-generated.
AI has slithered itself into everything, but our animal videos? That's a step too far.
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