CatGPT – a chatbot that meows everything

A new breed of feline-themed chatbots is a purr-fect break from the internet.

Cats have always been just a short click away from our daily routines, offering a welcome respite from the outside world even if just for a minute – or hours on end.

Whether it’s through funny videos or Grumpy Cat’s rise to stardom, the human obsession with cats on the internet is well-documented.

An urban legend started by cat food company Friskies a decade ago claimed that 15% of all internet traffic was driven by cat content – and we believed it.

Cementing their role as rulers of the internet, cats are now behind another viral success, a feline-themed chatbot called CatGPT. It is designed to look like ChatGPT – but answers every question with a random cat gif and a barrage of “meows.”

Cybernews asked the cat bot to share its insights into why cats are so popular on the internet, but you can ask anything you want.

Example prompts proposed on the website include “Explain how cats use quantum mechanics in hunting” and “How do cats make HTTP requests using cat-script?”

The answer is still a “meow” and a gif. After all, it is a cat you are talking to. According to CatGPT, it was “trained to decline walks and bath requests” and has “limited knowledge of world and cat videos after 2021.”

People love it. A video demonstration of CatGPT on TikTok by a user named “lonebody” had over three million views and 466,000 likes at the time of publishing.

The author explained he came across the chatbot by accidentally typing “CatGPT” into the browser instead of “ChatGPT” – a common mistake.

@lonebody Props to the devs behind this for wasting their time making this for absolutely no reason #ai #aiart #chatgpt #cats #meow ♬ Love You So - The King Khan & BBQ Show

That same typo would lead you to at least two other versions of CatGPT. One is CatGPT.wvd.io and was created by Dutch data journalist Wouter van Dijke.

He used ChatGPT to build it, but the site does not actually use it or any other form of AI and just returns a random number of “meows.”

Another website, called CatGPT.dog, is a talking cat-bot, and you can have an actual – if somewhat limited – conversation with it.

Asked by Cybernews who William Shakespeare was, it described the English playwright as “a purr-fectly famous writer” and “absolutely pawsome.”

It noted Shakespeare’s works were celebrated even “meow-nadays” but did not maintain conversation continuity when asked which one was its favorite.

Prompted further, it said it was “paw-sible” that some users might find The Tempest their favorite play by Shakespeare.

That’s one smartcat.