The basic plot of this video has been retold by different AI short-form video creators. This video follows similar story beats (baby falls off bridge, gets saved by heroic animal) with a few small variations: The baby falls off the Golden Gate Bridge, she evades a shark attack, she’s saved by a ripped bipedal cat instead of a dog, the cat raises the baby as his own, and he takes revenge on the mother that abandoned the baby on the bridge.
While not all of these videos are as high-stakes as those two, the ripped bipedal cats are by far the most compelling main characters in the AI short-form video cinematic universe.
If you’ve never seen a video like this before, you might start having an existential crisis about the future of internet entertainment upon viewing. Is this what the internet that produced “Shoes” and “Evolution of Dance” has come to? What is the point of posting such low-effort, pointless slop?
One might claim that comically phony AI videos of this genre exist for easily explainable reasons. A scammer might post these videos on social media to find elderly people in the comments who are susceptible to believing outlandish things. If they believe that an angry overweight woman actually broke a glass bridge with a giant boulder, they will surely fall for a scam that requires them to send $20K to a rando who claims to be able to double their money. That might explain why someone would post videos like these, but it fails to account for why they’re so popular.
A similarly cynical explanation for these videos' ubiquity is that they’re outrageous for the sake of being outrageous. People who make money off of online videos will do anything to get outrage-clicks because they’ll make more money than they would posting a video that doesn’t make anyone feel anything. There is certainly some truth to that, and the public has always had an appetite for feeling outraged. A boomer mom might not believe that this ripped bipedal cat actually exists, but she feels emotionally touched by his story and feels inspired to share it with her adult children.
We aren’t so far removed from a society that devoured Maury Povich and Jerry Springer, shows that got people to tune in with the promise (and delivery) of outrage. You gotta hand it to these AI cats, at least they aren’t exploiting actual people’s stories the way that trashy daytime TV shows of yesteryear did without hesitation. The most famous, more recent example of that phenomenon was the “Catch Me Outside” girl. However you felt about her back then or now, she was a real child who was struggling, and Dr. Phil put her on TV for millions of people to see, not because he actually wanted to help her, but because he knew her outrageous behavior would anger his audience.
The answer to the question of “Why are outrageous fake AI videos so popular?” is that they have entertainment value, whether we like it or not. I have sent so many of these videos to my mom and my sister just because I think they’re so funny every time. They are totally ridiculous, and that’s what I love about them. I know they are not art, I know their visuals and plots are totally hacky, but I don’t care. They are the lowest common denominator entertainment, and I have a place in my media diet for stuff like that. If I have already watched hours of Family Guy superimposed onto a video of someone playing Subway Surfers, I can’t claim that these outrageous AI videos are really that outrageous.
The thing that separates short-form video content from basically all other social media is that the algorithm chooses basically everything you consume from moment to moment. You can control your feed to only show you videos from people you follow, but that’s not how it’s meant to be used. TikTok and all the various Reels’ algorithms want to be able to show you as much low-effort slop as possible, and it doesn’t want you to have a problem with that. The longer you stay on the app, the better, and if it takes edited episodes of Desperate Housewives that evade copyright infringement or AI videos that barely keep your brain turned on to do so, then that’s what these platforms will promote.
There might be a world where we decide to turn off our phones when our TikTok algorithms get a little too stupid because our time is worth more than that, but that’s not the trajectory the internet appears to be going in. Being on the internet is the default setting for most people’s leisure time, and we are not encouraged to think critically about how we spend our time online. It’s easy to point and laugh at the stupid old people who believe absurd internet videos, but if we are watching the same things as them and not questioning why we’re spending our time this way, are we really so much better than them?
We aren’t taught to critically engage with the content we scroll through on social media. Maybe if we were, we’d be less certain that the internet was only going to get more stupid from here.
