The unstoppable rise of Chubby: Why TikTok's AI-generated cat could be the future of the internet

Tearjerker videos of AI-generated cats earned millions of views and a devoted following, blurring the line between spam and art. Is it the algorithm, or is this what the internet wants?

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 @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.

Most videos place the cats in depressing human situations. Chubby Jr faces schoolyard bullying. Chubby is addicted to cigarettes. The cats get drafted and go to war. And for the past three months, the videos have almost all been soundtracked by an AI-generated cover of Billie Eilish's What Was I Made For, with the lyrics swapped out for meows. Before that, the standard song was a meowed AI cover of Sia's Unstoppable. 

"can't let gang know i teared up to this" reads one typical comment on a TikTok by @relatablecutecats (160,000 followers) about Chubby Jr failing a test at school. "Out of all things happening in this world this is what I get sad at," comments another viewer on a video about Chubby Jr getting abducted by a pigeon while eating McDonald's with his father.

The AI-generated cat stories are objectively weird. They are also wildly popular, and more than a little controversial. But whether or not Chubby is what people are looking for when they go online, this is the content the internet is giving us – at least for now. The only question is why?

Whether they're grumpy, keyboard playing or "Nyanning", cats have always been at the heart of digital culture. Jessica Maddox, professor at the University of Alabama and author of The Internet Is for Cats: How Animal Images Shape Our Digital Lives, says cat content is a hit not just because it's cute, but because "images of cats can be malleable… we can make cat images mean whatever we want them to mean". In the Victorian era, Maddox says, "people wrote letters to each other in their cats' voices and printed off photo-plates of their cats to share with friends".

Cats were a natural fit as meme culture took root online. And as technology advances, pet lovers have moved from photos of cats to generating them with artificial intelligence. The debut of free-to-use and widely available AI generators like Midjourney, ElevenLabs and DALL-E has changed the look, feel and landscape of the web. By putting powerful tools into the hands of anybody with an internet connection and a sufficient amount of chutzpah, these AI generators catalysed a rapid bloom of new genres of online content.

"I began in January 2024", says Charles, the creator behind the popular @mpminds who asked to withhold his full name to protect his professional reputation. "I saw another which made AI-generated pictures of cats, not the same content, but kind of the same vibe. I remixed it to make stories, and created the characters of Chubby and Chubby Jr. So it was maybe sketched out a bit before me, but I took the road and customised things to make it what it is today."

Many creators have followed the same path, using AI tools to remix existing culture the way other internet s riff on movies, music, politics and all else. "I knew there was potential to make money on TikTok, and I saw that AI-generated content was quite popular," says Charles, who works in the finance business in . "I experimented with different ideas before the cat videos, and it was the cat videos that really took off, so I stuck with that."

"A lot of people don't realise how AI has become so baked into social media, both in of features and shareable content. Someone might be sharing a popular social media post that is AI without realising it", Maddox says. But as more and more AI-generated content appears online, there is also more and more "pushback", she says.

s and researchers have noted an increase in what's come to be known as "AI slop", low-quality content manufactured in large amounts by people using AI generators. The most famous example is probably the "Shrimp Jesus" study from early 2024, in which researchers at Stanford and Georgetown documented networks of AI-generated spam s on Facebook. These s posted surreal AI-generated images dozens of times a day, garnering hundreds of millions of likes and views. One AI-generated post was reportedly among the top ten most-viewed posts on the entire platform in the third quarter of 2023.

By enrolling in the monetisation programs of the platforms or directing viewers to external links and services, s creating this kind of content can make money. There's also money to be made in teaching others to generate content with AI. As reported in the Washington Post, AI cat stories creators sell courses that instruct students in how best to gain a following and make money. 

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