this post was submitted on 07 May 2026
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Definitely AI but pretty good with keeping quite consistent across the scene. Hides the more obvious tells very well behind the low quality so you're sorta not sure if it's just really compressed or actually weird.
Was the cat likely a real cat from superimposed footage? I thought rendering hair physics is somewhat computer intensive. Plus the YouTube channel never has the same cat twice.
I would say probably not, because that's really hard to do and probably not worth it. Rendering hair physics is indeed very computationally intensive, but that's not what the AI is really doing, it's generating frames out of noise and statistical likelihood of pixel values based on training data and previous frames. It's not really generating hair or cats per se, just what's likely to be next based on what was before and what was in thousands and thousands of other videos of cats. It kinda bypasses the the need for physics simulation. However, this process too is extremely computationally intensive and expensive for that matter, but typically they're short low resolution videos generated by online services that are running datacentres to be able to do this and doing so at a massive financial loss while they figure out where the money is going to come from with this emerging tech. It's both more impressive and easier than hair simulation in some ways and also harder and worse in many ways.
Holy moly. Then truly a demonstration of wealth of sorts -- unfettered data processing power. 🤖👍
Dang, are you sure? I've seen cats do stuff like this with their owners and trusted people, so am kinda baffled why someone would need to use AI for this.
Dammit...
Ok so to backtrack a bit on my former "definitely", I should acknowledge that I have no means of externally verifying my claim, though I still stand by it. I'll list some of what leads my to believe this along with counterarguments. The list is technical and contextual.
Contextually:
Technically:
Without any way to actually verify my claims, I can't be absolutely sure, but it's this balance of context and accumulation of weirdnesses that makes me very confident that yes, it's AI generated along with most or more probably all the other videos on their channel. Cats sometimes do funny and unexpected things and sometimes people are filming at just the right moment to capture it, but it's precisely because those things are unusual and rarely captured that they're big hits online. Cat videos are a popular genre, which makes collecting and publishing them attractive to people. However, this channel to me, is suss even without too much visual analysis because the moments they've supposedly captured and put up there seem to be about cats behaving in implausible ways that line up with anthropomorphic themes. They want attention and views and so it's not enough that the cats merely be doing funny stuff, it can't be just a cat that got on a trampoline all by itself and walked around, it had to jump repeatedly and induce bouncing on purpose like humans would do on a trampoline. And it couldn't just be the one rare cat that does it, in another video, several different cats do. Their other videos seem to revolve around cats going on rides in elaborate contraptions set up for them. The cats are pretty passive in those videos so they're arguably not acting like people per se, but unlike cats they never get out of the contraptions they're in, or run off once the 'ride' is over, they're remarkably chill. Maybe one person's weird cat acts that way, but these people have at least 4 cats and they seem to do this kind of thing all the time in multiple scenarios. I had an ad blocker so I don't know if they've tried to run ads on their channel but if they do, that probably tells you everything you need to know about the why aspect of it. Even if not, it could just be someone messing around, having fun with new tech or just interested in seeing how much attention they can garner by any means necessary.
EDIT: They sell merchandise with their channel name. That's the why part answered.
Amazing, thorough, and even-handed analysis. I both thank and salute you for that. So I'll edit the title in a bit, reflecting this stuff.
In my defense, I have a disease which leaves me tired most of the time, and I also happen to have floaters in my eyes. This seemed a pretty low-stakes video, so I 'went for it.'
Altho interestingly, from what I understand of how the eyes and brain work, it seems we commonly fill in a lot of context above and beyond the info our raw vision imparts to us, helping to make our finished vision a smoother and fuller experience. Indeed, i seems like these AI videos actually kind of prey on how that works for us. Very clever, but routinely giving the impression (upon inspection) of being nothing but big fat lies.
I have to disagree here. I've had several cats across my lifetime, and almost every one had one or more unique, quirky behaviors that didn't take much effort to replicate for a theoretical video. Because cats are curious, playful creatures, so whether its using a frozen pool as a skating rink, diving in to boxes of packing peanuts, or yes... playing on trampolines, when you add a favorite person of theirs and perhaps a treat, Robert's your avuncular figure. The video got me NOT because it seemed far-fetched, but because it was highly plausible, cute, funny, and bite-sized in length.