Woman orders coloring book online, art gets increasingly weird

A woman who ordered a coloring book online quickly realized it was made with AI, because the animals were, as she put it, “wonky.”

Annie, 27, who lives in Tennessee, found herself going massively viral on TikTok after showing off a coloring book she said she had bought from Chinese online marketplace Temu.

Known for selling products at a low price, Annie decided to pick up a coloring book titled Curious Kitty’s Adventures, with the cover showing a smoky gray cat sitting in a room filled with flowers, the sun setting in the background.

In the video, which has over 100,000 likes and a million views since being uploaded on May 17, Annie (@annieleighsweettea) flicks through the art inside, noticing that some of the cats have some random “lumps” or an extra limb.

But as she delves deeper into the book, the cats get stranger and stranger.

Some melt into furniture, others are seemingly cut in half, some appear mummified, and many don’t look like cats at all.

Peppered with comments like “I’m not sure what’s happening there,” “What’s going on with that?” and “I don’t even know what that is,” as well as breathless laughter, Annie’s video proved a smash-hit online, as she asked people to “look at this badly AI generated coloring book I’m DYING”

Hundreds of users flocked to the comments, with one pointing out “that one cat literally mummifying on the ground,” and another joking: “I mean, the title does say the kitties are ‘curious.'”

“To be fair I’ve seen my cats in all of these poses,” another joked.

While some asked Annie to “drop the link” to buy the product, others pleaded with people to support independent artists or print out coloring sheets at the local library.

Annie told Newsweek it was her first time buying a coloring book on Temu, having previously used it to buy household items and pet supplies.

“The description didn’t mention it being AI generated but one or two of the item pictures showed the funky pages,” she said, only realizing “something was weird” when she went to start coloring in.

“And then I started flipping through and saw how crazy they all were!”

According to data compiled by Statista, the number of people globally using AI tools was over 250 million in 2023, more than doubling from the 2020 number

The data projects this growth “is expected to continue, pushing past 700 million by the end of the decade”. And Statista data also predicts the market size of AI is “projected to rise from 241.8 billion U.S. dollars in 2023 to almost 740 billion U.S. dollars in 2030”.

Annie initially sent the video to friends on Snapchat, where they suggested she upload it to TikTok “because it was so ridiculous and funny.”

She said: “When I posted it I had an inkling it would get a good bit of views because it was so funny, but did not expect over a million for sure.

She advised anyone looking for a good coloring book to check out “artists out there who actually draw quality coloring books,” rather than the “wonky stuff” she found in Curious Kitty’s Adventure.

Newsweek has reached out to Temu for comment on this story.

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