What's "Cat Royale"?
Cat Royale is an interactive installation where three cats (Ghostbuster, Pumpkin, and Clover) spent 12 days in a custom environment while a robot arm played games with them. An AI system learned which activities each cat preferred and adapted its play strategies accordingly. The artists created what they called 'a utopia for cats' to explore care relationships between animals and autonomous systems.
You can find more Cat Royale videos and highlights from each day here.
Who's it for?
Cat Royale is aimed at public audiences interested in AI and care, as well as researchers studying how humans and other animals interact with each other. The project also seeks to help policymakers and technologists working on the regulation of autonomous systems make more informed decisions.
Approach
The work adopts a Research through Design within a multidisciplinary project. Artists, computer scientists, and animal welfare experts collaborated to design and build the AI system. Over 12 days, the system learned about the cats preferences through observation, while welfare officers continuously monitored to ensure ethical treatment. The team were careful to ensure that rigorous welfare protocols were created from the outset to protect the overall wellbeing of the cats.
Contribution
Through the design and deployment of Cat Royale, the project demonstrates that using computers to measure and happiness using AI and algorithms is far more complex than is often suggested. The work shows how to engage animal welfare experts and the public in designing autonomous systems from the outset as part of responsible AI development. In addition to practical contributions, such as welfare protocols and public engagement methods, the project created new ideas about what care and trust really mean. The work also demonstrated some of the limitations in automated decision-making.
Why is it in the Observatory?
This project offers a concrete example of how Design Research can make the extremely complicated areas such as AI ethics accessible and engaging for public audiences. By using the familiar context of caring for pets, it demonstrates how to facilitate meaningful conversations about automated decision-making, trust, and responsibility in ways that technical papers or policy documents cannot achieve.