I woke up to the news that there’s a new free app where you take photos of cats and automatically convert them into pets for a Pokémon Go-inspired experience. “Brilliant,” I thought, too bad the execution is filled with all sorts of fun-breaking AI slop.
The concept is very similar to that of Pokémon Go, with the bonus that you now have to go on a more organic search for cats in real life, which CatchCat then turns into unique in-game avatars, with new names, abilities, and stats.
Now, ignoring how we’re embracing a semi-fictional world where we get the cats in all of Earth’s neighborhoods to fight each other to our pleasure, we must look into the other big problem at hand. This would all be great stuff if it just kept the photo of the cat, then randomly granted the cat a bunch of balanced stats, then a few abilities featuring fun writing by actual writers. Instead, the in-game avatar shows the cat after he was transported to AI slop land.
Many news outlets are glazing CatchCat, and I get the temptation. Everyone loves cats, and everyone misses the height of the Pokémon Go era. That’s not just because of the game itself, but because it also coincided with the last shred of normalcy we’ve experienced in our lifetimes. On paper, CatchCat is great, perhaps great enough to become an Internet sensation, but we cannot ignore how this thing runs mostly on AI slop and thus, naturally, is far less fun. You might not notice it in many of the game’s photos, like this one of “Phoenix.”
But some of them are just dead giveaways of the same absolutely washed AI art you now see everywhere on the Internet.
A lot of CatchCat game looks just like that, down to its map, which shows all the game-fied cats in your neighborhood.
That’s just a total bummer. It’s not every day that you see such a cool idea fumbled in such a way.
Most gamers are likely to be put off by this at first contact. Still, a lot of people outside of the gaming bubble also use the app market, many who aren’t informed about the dangers of the tech, so it’d really suck to see CatchCat becoming a hit by using something people love so much as a Trojan Cat.
