Matt Nelson wasn’t looking for fame, exactly, when he rated his first dog on Twitter in 2015. He just thought it would be funny to post a Yelp-style critique of a friend’s shepherd mix lounging on the stairs: “8/10 would pet,” he wrote in the caption.

Now he presides over a social media juggernaut. Nelson’s company, WeRateDogs (Tagline: “your only source for professional dog rating”), is one of social media’s most successful dog-centric accounts, with some 20 million followers across X, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. It has a thriving merchandise business, a podcast called “The Dogs Were Good (Again)”; and a charitable foundation that has raised nearly $5 million for needy dogs this year.

WeRateDogs has no real rivals per se (“We’re very lucky not to have direct competition in the dog-rating industry,” Nelson said). But it does have an existential enemy: A.I., in all its dystopian manifestations.

These days, you click one heartwarming video of an A.I. dog jumping over a T.S.A. barrier to be reunited with a member of the military and your algorithm floods your feed with dozens of similar videos: fake dogs running across airports, through train stations, and down streets, leaping onto fake sobbing people.

Image

Nelson believe A.I. has “no place in any creative endeavor.” His content is now competing with A.I content that can flood dog lovers’ feeds. Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times

They make you happy until you realize you’ve been duped, and then they make you furious. It’s a particularly cruel joke for animal lovers who rely on videos of cute animals to escape from our human troubles.

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Source: The New York Times · Sarah Lyall

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Topic
Technology
Country
🇺🇸 US
Publisher language
EN
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