How do AI pet influencers who don't even have a pet of their own manage to get you hooked on cloud petting?

Nowadays, you can even become a pet content creator without owning any real pets.

A white cat and an orange cat are making osmanthus rice wine coffee in the yard. The white cat skillfully sifts the rice, cleans it and boils the wine, while the orange cat wanders around touching everything, almost knocking over the whole pot of rice. The movements in the footage are smooth, and comments scrolling across the bullet screen read "The cats have excellent cooking skills" and "The orange cat never gets a beating for no reason".

In fact, these two cats have never existed. They are virtual characters generated by @CatZiqī using AI.

Now, when you open Douyin or Xiaohongshu, AI-generated cats have become unavoidable push content: you can see cats taking the subway to work, cats riding electric scooters to deliver takeout, and Bichon Frise transformed into ancient-style princesses acting in palace rival dramas. Kittens, puppies, rabbits, foxes... you don't need to raise any real pets to carve out a place in the pet content track.

From the perspective of TopKlout, when "fur kids" no longer need to exist in reality, a complete assembly line covering script generation, image production, batch update and commercial monetization is spawning a brand new track based on the 300-billion-yuan pet economy.

The "Virtual Pet Raising" Track Attracts New Players

In the past, there was an unbreakable rule for creating cute pet content: you had to own a pet first.

People shot videos around the daily life, interactions and interesting moments of the cat or dog, and the content quality was highly dependent on the state of the pet itself: whether it cooperated that day, whether its movements looked good, and whether it made a surprising move. Since pets are uncontrollable, the frequency and effect of content updates would be correspondingly unstable.

But now, this prerequisite for becoming a pet content creator has been directly bypassed by AI tools.

As long as creators confirm the content direction and have basic video editing skills, all the rest of the work can be handed over to AI. They can use DeepSeek or ChatGPT to generate story scripts, use Jimeng, Keling or Midjourney to generate images, then turn the images into videos, and finally complete the editing and dubbing with CapCut.

We can also see that a group of AI pet content creators are rising rapidly on major social platforms. For example, @Philosophy of Mimi Cat's Life shoots working vlogs with cats, gaining more than 248,000 followers on a single platform; @Mimi's Crispy Angle has countless hit videos on Douyin, with a maximum of 1.56 million likes for a single video, and the account now has nearly 2.5 million followers.

Not limited to domestic platforms, this type of video is also extremely popular overseas. According to reports from multiple media outlets, the YouTube channel Batysyr gained 770,000 followers and 100 million views in one month with only 20 AI cat videos; another channel Cat channel 91 used to post real cat videos with mediocre views, but after switching to AI cats, its number of subscribers quickly increased to 2 million.

Behind these figures is a change in the underlying logic. The past logic was "get a cat first, then decide what to shoot". The current logic is "design the story first, then let AI create the cat". Narratives have become the core here, while pets have become props instead.

When the footage no longer relies on real cats and dogs, the physical threshold of "you can only enter the pet track if you own a pet" has been completely eliminated. But after the threshold is removed, what floods in is not only opportunities, but also thousands of homogeneous competitors. The real competition has only just begun.

Three Development Paths for AI Pets

When the physical threshold of "owning a pet to enter the market" is broken, creators will find that AI can generate cats, but it cannot generate a reason for the audience to remember them.

As TopKlout stated in the "2026 China Content Agency (MCN) Industry Development Research White Paper": "AI is the 'hand' of creators, and creators are always the 'brain' of AI." Technology provides the brush, but the questions that determine the life and death of content — what to paint, how to paint, and who to show it to — still need to be answered by the creators themselves.

In the early stage, AI pet videos only stayed at the stage of making cats say "mom" or simply dance to hand gestures, which was more like an animation experience, lacking the affinity of real cats and dogs. However, with the progress of domestic AI video tools, content forms have differentiated rapidly. At present, three mainstream routes have taken shape in this track:

Lifestyle Healing Style: Cats and Dogs Repair Everything

@Mimi's Crispy Angle is a tabby cat with crispy angle-shaped ears on its head. The inspiration comes from the internet meme where users edit cat ears into the snack Cheetos, paired with the joke "the cat has its edges and corners smoothed by life". The creator turned this meme into a fixed character: a "cat master" who can sew, repair things, has a rough life but always works earnestly.

With this setting, in each video, the cat master works diligently in different scenarios: patching the glass of a skyscraper, performing "surgery" on a broken bicycle, repairing the security check machine for humans...

It works meticulously, but occasionally makes mistakes. This earnest but slightly bumpy life state exactly resonates with the daily life of ordinary people. Just as the line written on its homepage says "The cat sews and mends everything, and also mends your mood", many viewers keep following its updates just for this little sense of healing.

Strong Plot Serialization: Build a Solid Character, Retain the Fans

Each video of @CatZiqī has a clear theme, such as cooking, setting up a stall to apply phone films, tie-dyeing and so on, as if it is targeting a "cat version of Li Ziqi". But what really makes the audience remember it is the fixed "cat personalities" — the white cat is hardworking while the orange cat is mischievous — and the chemical reaction between the two cats.

When cooking, the white cat is busy running around in front, while the orange cat sneaks food and causes trouble aside; when riding a bike, the white cat carries the orange cat on bumpy roads, and the orange cat bounces up and down on the back seat. Their completely different personalities create plenty of funny moments, and also make the audience remember the relationship between the two characters.

The key to this type of strong plot account is that each episode has a complete main task, there is a stable interactive relationship between characters, and funny moments are continuously updated. Another account following the plot route is @Cats and Dogs Raising Kids, where a Samoyed puppy picks up a little tabby cat. It has gained more than 500,000 likes with only one episode updated, and countless fans are urging for new content in the comment section.

Keep Shooting Vlogs: A Sense of Companionship Is the Hard Truth

This type of account abandons strong conflicts and exaggerated settings, letting the AI cat live a daily life just like a real human content creator. @A Little Huangdou and @Philosophy of Mimi Cat's Life both record plain daily life in front of the camera, with a slow pace and soft emotional expression. They seem the most "plain" at first glance, but actually enjoy the long-standing dividend of the vlog category: the sense of companionship.

The reason why viewers follow their updates is no different from following real human vlogs. It's not that there is a major event in each episode, but the fact that "it is still here, living a good life" itself is a continuous highlight. Taking the subway on workdays, having meetings and making spreadsheets, buying grilled sausages after work, wandering in the supermarket, and going home to work overtime in front of the computer.

When this kind of daily narrative is combined with hot topics, funny moments naturally emerge. The Chongqing travel vlog of @A Little Huangdou combines the popular internet meme of "Chongqing landing visa" some time ago. With the familiar city, familiar meme, and the protagonist replaced by a chubby little orange cat, a strong sense of contrast is created, making countless viewers enjoy watching it.

The three routes seem to be different, but their core is the same: the animal is the shell, and emotion is the core. The audience is not "smelling the cat" to get relaxed, but absorbing the part of emotional comfort that they lack.

New Thresholds Beyond Technology

When technology is accessible to everyone and compliance thresholds are leveled, the essence of competition in the AI pet track has changed.

Technology is available for everyone to buy, but what users remember, love and follow for a long time is the character asset: a virtual living being with distinct personality, memorable traits and emotional connections.

The 2.45 million followers of @Mimi's Crispy Angle are not following "a cat fixed a doll", but the cat master who works earnestly despite all the setbacks, wondering what new order it has taken today; the audience of @Cats and Dogs Raising Kids wait in the comment section for the next funny daily moment of the fur kid raising the little cat.

What the audience remembers is never the technology, but the personality. The construction of character assets tests three layers of capabilities: screenwriting thinking, persona operation, and emotional design.

But what makes character assets really valuable is not the conception, but the continuous output.

It is often said on social platforms that "you can become an AI cute pet content creator with zero cost", but the real cost accounting is much more complicated. At present, the monetization path has indeed taken shape: platform ad revenue sharing is the base, and brand commercial collaborations are the core. Among them, @Kawashima Pig has received 8 commercial collaborations from KFC, Haidilao and FamilyMart, with a quotation of 4500 yuan per video; short drama accounts like @LT Puppy Diary can quote as high as 80,000 yuan for a single advertisement.

For these accounts, window sales and IP licensing are long-term supplements. It is worth noting that the brands attracted by the window of AI pet accounts are no longer limited to pet products. Advertisers only care about traffic, and traffic does not care whether the pet is real or not.

But the so-called "zero cost" mentioned above only excludes the physical pet, but misses three real costs.

The first is generation cost. AI video costs 1 yuan per second, and the same footage often needs to be remade 3 to 7 times or even more. A video of tens of seconds may cost hundreds of yuan just for generation fees.

The second is time cost. It takes 1 to 2 days for @CatZiqī to make one video, and most of the time is spent on thinking about the script. "The steps are not difficult, the difficulty is to insert interesting funny moments into the steps". Technology can generate images, but it cannot generate funny moments.

The last and most difficult to quantify cost is that creativity will be exhausted, and inspiration will run out. There is no ready formula for continuously producing interesting stories. Technology costs have been reduced, but the threshold has shifted from "technology accounting" to "creativity accounting", and creativity is exactly the part that cannot be copied.

Final Notes

Looking back, the popularity of AI pets is not hard to understand. In the 300-billion-yuan pet economy, people spend money on their fur kids essentially for companionship and healing. When this emotion can be designed and stably delivered, whether the cat exists in reality becomes the most insignificant variable.

But precisely because of this, there is only one exam question left in this carnival. Tools will be popularized, footage will become homogeneous, and there will be more and more identical AI cats. In the end, the one who wins is the one who can make a non-existent cat live longer in the audience's heart than a real cat.

Audience can fall in love with a fictional cat, but it is hard for them to fall in love with a soulless cat.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "TopKlout" (ID: TopKlout), written by 77, and published with authorization from 36Kr.