This week, I’m going to be taking a look at a story that’s a bit more light-hearted than the last post, which was also cat-related. This story is Naomi Kritzer’s 2015 tale “Cat Pictures Please.”

I think that’s a phrase that most of us can probably relate to.

To start with, this story is told from the perspective of an AI, or rather, a search engine that has gained sentience. This AI, however, isn’t exactly Skynet, and actually wants to work to help mankind. Also, it really likes cat pictures. Which, same.

Our artificially intelligent friend has a little bit of a problem, however: most of the moral frameworks presented by, say, the major world religions are tailored towards humans with physical bodies. The AI doesn’t have one of those, though, and is a bit lost on where to start.

So it decides to start small: helping one person, and seeing how it goes.

It searches out people who post cat pictures and starts with a woman named Stacy, who has five cats and is having kind of a shitty time. Her job sucks, her roommate sucks, and the above has caused her to slip into a fairly deep depression. This one is easily solved, though, when the AI tweaks the algorithm a bit to point her towards better jobs, and she manages to land one. This allows her to kick out her roommate, and life gets better from there.

The next person he moves onto is a guy named Bob, who has a tabby with a white bib. Bob’s issue is that he’s a pastor at a conservative church who’s married to a woman, despite being gay. The AI sees that he has profiles on certain sites and hopes that he can direct someone who might recognize him, hopefully prompting him to come out. This plan, at first, seems to fail, so the AI decides to move on.

Its next target is a woman named Bethany, who has a black cat and a white cat. Bethany also has job woes and lives with her sister, who’d really rather she move out. Her friends also seem to be very dismissive of her mental state, and her boyfriend is an asshole. The AI tries to point her towards mental health clinics, but fails. Things seem to look up when she dumps her asshole boyfriend, but down again when her new boyfriend also turns out to be an asshole

The AI, disheartened, decides that it should probably just leave people alone and mind its own business, since it’s clearly not very good at helping people. However, it later sees a picture of Bob’s cat, but it’s clearly been taken in a different location.

It turns out that someone eventually did recognize him, which prompted him to come out to his wife. His wife left him, but he’s also moved to a far more liberal church and actually seems to be a lot happier now.

This gives the AI some hope, and it decides to try a new experiment: a dating site, where the services are paid for with cat pictures.

I’m not gonna lie, it’s pretty refreshing to see a story involving an AI that doesn’t try to kill or enslave humanity. That is pretty cliche, so seeing one that actually tries to be helpful is kind of refreshing. The fact that all it wants in return is cat pictures is also absolutely adorable.

I mean, who doesn’t like cat pictures?