The past few months have seen AI used to create everything from new trailers for TV shows to a controversial holiday commercial for Coca-Cola as well as realistic-sounding podcast episodes. With each new instance of the technology turning basic prompts into complex realism, it underscores the leaps and bounds that AI continues to make — and points to even greater progress that’s sure to come in the near future. Meanwhile, a new AI-generated video making the rounds online is going viral in a way that almost none of that content has before.
That’s because the video, in which a cute kitty grows up to be a super-jacked firefighter as a result of his former owner dying in a blaze, is one of the weirdest things the internet has produced in quite some time. It first caught my eye when an Andreessen Horowitz partner shared it on X, but the video is also all over Facebook and Reddit, attracting thousands of likes and views on both.
The virality is because the AI made some interesting as well as utterly baffling choices story-wise, like making the little furball in the video grow up to be a buff firefighter in order to avenge his elderly owner who died in a fire. And then the last we see of him is the muscly cat striding through the pearly gates — for a job well done or something.
The video above almost made me do a spit-take when the AI nearly gets things right but ultimately stumbles, such as with the old lady apparently lying in a hospital bed where she’s died. Instead of putting a white sheet over her, though, the AI decides at around the 24-second mark that all she needs is a Kleenex over her face. That’ll do!
And there’s still so much more here that needs to be unpacked. Like the Swiss flag as the Red Cross logo. The cat becoming a firefighter after starting the blaze when he was a kitty and then turning into a hulk of a muscle cat. It’s all pretty hilarious, until you stop and remind yourself of the insane amounts of energy and computation power that AI requires in order to spit out dreck like this. Referring to the video above, one Redditor lamented: “This is the crap we are going to use up all our clean water and burn down the rest of the planet for.” Good times.