It’s “the latest in pawtifurcial intelligence.”
CatGPT
Sure, OpenAI’s uber-popular AI chatbot ChatGPT is extremely good at spitting out some seriously impressive content, from believable college essays to source code and even real estate listings.
But that kind of AI prowess left Dutch data journalist Wouter van Dijke wanting more. The self-proclaimed “Twitter bot enthusiast” took it upon himself to answer the ultimate question: “what if ChatGPT were a cat?”
“ChatGPT is boring,” he wrote on his GitHub. “I want a cat to answer my questions. So I built CatGPT!”
CatGPT, as its name suggests, allows you to ask a “pawtifurcial intelligence” pretty much anything you’d want to ask a real-life cat.
What you get in response is a series of “meows” — since, well, cats can’t speak English.
“CatGPT uses a purr-al network and an advanced hairballgorithm to come up with natural-sounding responses,” van Dijke wrote in his pun-laden documentation.
Random Meows
The reality, as you might guess, is that the tech isn’t particularly advanced.
“Not really though, it just returns random meows,” van Dijke admitted.
Of course, that’s likely true of actual cats, too.
“To be clear: this site does not actually use ChatGPT or any other form of AI,” he wrote. “Nothing is done with the user input either.”
While it’s a fun and tongue-in-cheek take on ChatGPT, the project was more of a self-directed lesson in how to construct a basic website that looks and acts exactly like the real thing.
“It took some back and forth to get something looking alright, but it was quite useful to create a basic structure for the web page,” van Dijke wrote.
But it also happens to be exactly the kind of levity we needed after weeks of reporting on the slow death of journalism at the hands of AI.
Or, in the words of CatGPT: “Meow, meow meow meow, meow meow?”
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