Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI

"Let every kitten sing Chinese Rap!"

Mystery from the East The power has recently given foreigners a little bit of shock.

"God bless us with gold and silver, but God instructs us not to worry about the fight between dragons and tigers." This song "Cause and Effect" written by the domestic male Rapper "Lan Lao" is now popular on TikTok.

It doesn’t matter who Lan Lao is here. What’s important is that these two lyrics with strong Jianghu atmosphere must be sung by cute pets, which can be regarded as the traffic password of the current short video platform.

When the prelude beat of "Cause and Effect" sounded, the cat in the video seemed to grab the guy's upper body and started to sing with his mouth open, accompanied by the lame Chinese-English subtitles "God bless you with mountains of gold and silver", A cat rap video that became popular on TikTok was born.

The foreigner in the comment area was confused:

“Why is every cat singing this?”

“It’s true that cats can sing. ”

Recently, such cat rap videos are not only TikTok has easily received millions of views and has become a tried-and-tested traffic password for pet bloggers. Similar videos have also flooded into Instagram, as well as domestic and foreign mainstream social platforms such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu and Video Account.

In fact, the fact that a kitten can sing is not a biological miracle, but a new generation of technology and hard work driven by AI.

In these cat rap videos, the song is sung by Lan Lao, and the cat is responsible for being cute and creating a sense of contrast. The lip-syncing performed by the cat is performed by humans using AI lip-syncing tools.

If the language barrier prevents some foreign netizens from understanding the rules, then on domestic platforms, there are already people in the relevant video comment areas who want to do something to their own kittens, seemingly forcing them to perform on camera. , in fact, he secretly pokes at "showing off his cat" to show off.

The original lyrics were also created by a netizen who had no creative bottleneck and turned into "God bless all the cat food and freeze-drying". The relevant cut-out template once reached the top 11 of the hottest hits list, with a cumulative usage of The volume exceeded 4.62 million.

How did the Maomao rap video become popular all over the Internet? What AI lip-syncing tools can be used for behind-the-scenes production? We did some research🐱.

How did Maomao become a new traffic password when he sang the divine song of Douyin?

When it comes to this wave of AI cat rap, we have to mention the new Douyin song "Cause and Effect".

It may be the most popular and most annoying video BGM on Douyin recently, along with "APT." which became popular on the Internet some time ago. Netizens complained that it was used for 9 background music in 10 videos. They are both "Cause and Effect", which shows how popular they are.

"Cause and Effect" became popularLater, the first wave of popularity came from this generation of young people who did not seek love but only money. According to Xinduo, a data tool owned by Xinbang, the topic #God bless Jinshan Yinshan, all of which are available # began to be viewed significantly on October 13. As of now, the cumulative views of this topic have reached 900 million times.

In the popular videos related to this topic, young people either put their hands together in prayer, or perform silky transitions and hand dances to create a sense of atmosphere, and some even directly match photos of blessings in temples. Shang Lanlao's "Cause and Effect" piously completes a cybernetic God-seeking performance.

The ins and outs of the story are somewhat abstract up to this point, but what is even more abstract is that perhaps even Lan Lao himself did not expect that his songs became popular abroad because pets can also sing. .

On November 1, Douyin pet blogger "Monica" released a Bichon rap video with "Cause and Effect" in the background. It received 320,000 likes, which is the performance since the creation of her account. The best piece of work. Some netizens in the hot comments said, "My mother watched it, and she is still telling me that it is really a dog singing."

A few days later, the same own incident happened again on TikTok. On November 3, TikTok pet blogger "abbieququ" released a similar rap video that day, but this time the protagonist in the video was replaced by her own teddy.

As soon as the video was released, it became popular on TikTok, with more than 6 million views and more than 800,000 likes, far exceeding the average data of recent works released by bloggers.

Someone also asked in the comment area, is it really the puppy rapping? How to train?

As this video became popular, the method of asking your cute pet to sing "Cause and Effect" quickly became popular on TikTok. According to the observation of "AI New List", rap videos of cats are not only more numerous on major platforms, but also generally have better data performance than videos of other cute pets such as dogs.

For example, under the Douyin topic #cutepet版God bless the gold and silver mountains#, the videos with more than a million likes are all cat rap videos.

There are also traces of why cats easily stand out among all the cute pets on social media. The 2024 Douyin Pet Market Insight Report shows that the market size and growth rate of cat pet products on the Douyin platform exceed that of dogs.

Image source: "2024 Douyin Eight Pet Mentality Crowd Insight Report"

Cats have become "national pets". Industry analysts generally believe that this preference is closely related to people's lives under the trend of urbanization. It is related to factors such as accelerated pace and space constraints. People such as urban residents who use social media more frequently are more likely to choose pets that do not require much space and energy.

From the content point of view, the combination of the magical and brainwashing melody of Douyin Divine Comedy and the visual image of cats can often quickly catch the audience's attention. Especially driven by Internet celebrity cats such as "Fresh Brother" and "Evil Silver Gradient", the various temperaments derived from cats in the context of the Internet are more likely to be used as memes by netizens.This leads to viral spread.

In the future, all Douyin songs may be sung by AI cats.

How to use AI lip-syncing tool to make your cute pet sing?

As the AI ​​cat rap game becomes popular, related production tutorials are also becoming popular on Douyin. Some accounts will also embed products in tutorials and divert users to their own mini programs for registration.

If you want to use the cat singing templates built into these products, you often need to unlock the use of these templates by watching ads or paying for the first time.

In fact, there are many AI lip-syncing tools on the market, including products and open source models launched by major manufacturers such as Douyin and Kuaishou. Compared with templates, this type of tool has higher creative flexibility and can freely combine different texts and songs, instead of being limited to using fixed song templates to lip-sync.

According to observations, many popular cat rap videos on Douyin and TikTok are now watermarked with "cutting AI". We also tried two methods of making cute pet lip-syncing videos on Cutting: Cutting templates and Cutting’s built-in AI lip-syncing function.

Cutting templates: Open the Cutting App on the mobile phone, find the "Cut the same style" option in the bottom menu bar, search for "Use AI to make cute pets sing" to find popular templates, click to enter and just upload A picture can generate a video.

Clip AI lip sync function: After entering the clip app on the mobile phone, click "Start Creating" directly, then import the picture, select it on the timeline, and find "AI Lip Sync" in the bottom menu Function, after entering, select "Generate with Audio" to find the entrance to the Douyin music library, search for the corresponding popular songs, and perform live broadcasts.

In the actual test, using the cutout AI lip-syncing function to create a lip-syncing video, although there are a few more steps, there are no restrictions on song selection, and the corresponding creative space will be larger.

However, the AI ​​lip-syncing function is no longer supported by non-paying users, and membership fees are also quietly increasing.

For this reason, we have found two more alternatives: Jimeng AI, both owned by Byte, and Kuaishou’s open source model LivePortrait.

Jimeng AI currently rewards users with certain points for logging in every day. The model "Loopy" behind its lip-syncing function has also been popular in the AI ​​​​circle for a while. Functionally, it also supports two lip-syncing methods, including text reading and audio generation.

However, songs that match lip-syncs with pictures require users to upload them locally because Jimeng AI has not yet been connected to the Douyin music library.

LivePortrait is an open source free video generation framework launched by the Kuaishou Keling model team earlier. Initially, AI was used to drive portraits in real time for live broadcasting, which quickly became popular in the AI ​​circle. Later, the development team made fine-tuning on the animal data set and launched a system that can perform live broadcast on animal portraits.Precision driven version.

https://github.com/KwaiVGI/LivePortrait

However, compared to Jianying and Jimeng AI, if you want to get started with LivePortrait, you need a certain hardware foundation and local deployment. experience. In terms of function implementation, Jianying and Jimeng AI use audio + picture driving methods, while LivePortrait uses video + picture driving methods to generate lip-sync videos.

Since LivePortrait uses video as input, it has richer performance in animal expression driving, providing more creative space for creators. For example, you can take a video of a cat talking and then use LivePortrait to convert the performance into a lip-syncing video.

The emergence of new tools will always promote the emergence of a wave of new ways to play AI cute pets. From the early AI Maomao drama account to the current AI Maomao rap that has become popular all over the Internet, there are corresponding AI tool supports behind it.

It can be said that the introduction of new AIGC tools has undoubtedly made the content of the pet track more diverse.

Although this traffic method has a short life cycle, it also fits the fast-paced logic of the short video platform.

On a platform where content changes rapidly, the immediacy and novelty of the content are the keys to attracting attention. When a hot spot passes, the next hot spot will always appear; when a gameplay passes, the next gameplay will always be created.

This is why platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou are happy to see the prosperity of AIGC creations. From AI Maomao drama account to AI Maomao rap, we can see that while new technologies lower the threshold of creation, they also stimulate the vitality of UGC creators to a great extent, and ultimately feed back the platform to promote the continuous evolution of the content ecology.