Kazakhstani model and AI content creator Alissa Kamorskaya runs Chudno, a school and agency specializing in AI-generated content. Kamorskaya began publishing AI cartoons in February 2026, and one of her videos has since received more than 30 million views on Instagram. The Times of Central Asia spoke with her about the rise of AI animation and the role of social media algorithms in driving views.
TCA: You began creating AI cartoons before the format became widespread in Kazakhstan. Why do you think your most-viewed video attracted such a large audience?
Alissa: I think several factors played a role. One was that when I made my most-viewed cartoons, almost no one in the post-Soviet space was using this format.
I posted my first one on February 3 this year. I wanted to tell my followers how I met my husband, but I simply didn’t have any video footage to illustrate it, so I decided to turn it into a cartoon. The views quickly took off, my social media audience started growing, and I realized it was a very promising niche.
AI cartoons have now become hugely popular. You can see animated videos recommended on social media getting as many as 100 million views. They have spread across social media so quickly that it feels as though AI cartoons have been around for a long time. In reality, broadly speaking, they have only been this widespread for about six months.
TCA: Why does animation work so well with a mass audience?
Alissa: I think it’s because animation is almost universal. Very often it doesn’t need words at all. A cartoon can be understood by someone of any age, from any country, speaking any language. Someone could be sitting somewhere in Cambodia, see the video, and still understand what is happening. So the potential audience for this kind of content is enormous.
TCA: Do you see that in the geographic breakdown of your audience?
Alissa: I analyzed the statistics for several videos and noticed that a lot of viewers come from Turkey and Iran. I think that is partly connected to how my characters look. They have dark hair and darker skin, so viewers in those countries may find them more familiar-looking.
I often see comments in Turkish under the videos, and I can tell that people recognize themselves in these characters. Visual identification is very important here. It works much like it does in movies, or when we were children and picked a favorite character and said, “I’ll be this one.” We want to recognize ourselves in characters and identify with them.
TCA: Before AI animation, you ran a conventional blog for about five years. Why did cartoons change things so dramatically?
Alissa: I had been blogging for about five years, constantly filming myself, and my audience barely grew. For several years, my follower count stayed at around 3,000. Everything changed only when I switched from making what I personally liked to what interested a much wider range of people.
I used to really want to be different and niche, to make something entirely my own. Then I started analyzing mass audiences: what makes them laugh, what triggers emotions, and what people respond to in the comments. Sometimes a video gets 30 million views and you sit there trying to figure out why that particular one worked. If you really want mass reach, you have to learn to think about what interests millions of people.
TCA: And what did you learn about what this audience wants?
Alissa: What surprised me most is how well very simple, easily understood ideas work on social media. Sometimes something that gets a huge response from the audience seems completely basic or even primitive to me.
I have a cartoon about nomads that I made with my dad. It deals with a big, serious subject and contains a lot of information, but the video didn’t take off at all. Then I made a very simple cartoon about love languages: the girl is very tactile and the guy isn’t. That was the one that got 30 million views. People recognized themselves, laughed, and started sending it to one another.
Those are the rules of social media: the easier it is for someone to grasp a situation and relate it to their own life, the greater the chance that the content will go viral.
TCA: So do algorithms push creators toward simplifying their content?
Alissa: I think that process is already happening. Content is getting shorter and more primitive, and the trend will probably continue. In the past, someone might watch an hour-long lecture on YouTube. Now we have ten-second Reels. Information is being compressed as much as possible. Everything has to be fast and easy to understand, and that actually scares me a little.
I resisted it for a long time. My ego was completely opposed to making things more primitive, but that got me nowhere. Now I simply see it as part of my job. If I want to use social media as a promotional tool, I need to understand its rules and play by them. It is a system much bigger than I am, and I can’t dictate anything to it.
TCA: How do you actually make your cartoons?
Alissa: I prefer Higgsfield because it’s an aggregator, a bit like Netflix. Except instead of movies, it brings different AI models together on one platform.
But when I teach students at my school, understanding the logic of working with AI is much more important to me than any particular platform. If someone understands the basic principles of creating images and videos, they can later switch to almost any other service. They’ll need some time to get used to the new interface, but the underlying logic will remain roughly the same.
TCA: Is it possible to produce AI animation seriously for free today?
Alissa: I don’t really believe it is. Services usually offer a trial version or a few free generations so people can try the tool, but for serious work, you will still need paid subscriptions and credits.
I think it makes sense that using AI isn’t completely free because every generation has a real resource cost. Artificial intelligence requires enormous computing power, electricity, and cooling systems, which ultimately means using natural resources as well. The faster the industry develops, the more serious the question of its environmental footprint becomes.
TCA: How much time and money does it take to produce one cartoon?
Alissa: The work begins with creating the characters. We generate images, develop the visual style, work on the characters’ likeness, and only after the client approves them do we move on to the animation itself. Then we add voice-over, music, sound effects, and subtitles.
A lot depends on experience. I can make a cartoon in about two hours, while a beginner would spend much more time and use more generation credits. A one-minute video costs around 40,000 tenge and up, although the final price depends on how complex the idea is. Clients usually want videos of about a minute for social media. It becomes much harder to hold viewers’ attention with anything longer.
TCA: Who commissions AI animation today?
Alissa: Young people order animated love stories for weddings, while entrepreneurs ask for cartoons about how they built their businesses. It can make for a very colorful company story. You can really tell any story through AI animation.
Many well-known brands have been using artificial intelligence in advertising for some time. AI animation is still used less often, but I think it will become much more common soon.
Working with large companies is a little more complicated. They have their own visual identities, recognizable colors and imagery, and sometimes their own characters. So the animation has to be adapted to the visual language of a particular brand. Major brands can’t simply generate a video in the style of Disney or Pixar, not least because of copyright issues. I think we will soon see original animated characters and entire cartoon worlds developed specifically for individual brands.
TCA: How expensive are the AI tools themselves?
Alissa: The cheapest Higgsfield subscription is around $15, but you can’t do very much with it, while more serious plans can cost around $150. For a Kazakh creator, that’s fairly expensive.
But the platform has a huge advantage: convenience. Almost everything you need is available in one place, along with lots of ready-made templates and tools. Its creators also understand trends and the visual language of Gen Z and Generation Alpha very well, so the platform is genuinely convenient to use.
TCA: Have you thought about targeting an English-speaking audience directly?
Alissa: I’ve thought about it mainly as a way to promote my AI training school, but it would be a huge amount of work. I already spend all day working on my Russian-language blog, and for a second account I would have to translate and adapt practically all of the content into English.
In theory, it’s a very interesting direction, especially because YouTube can be monetized well. But the platform is quite strict about quality. It isn’t enough to simply generate a basic AI video. The content has to be genuinely original. So there is potentially money to be made there, but in my view it is much harder to grow on YouTube than on Instagram.
TCA: Is there a noticeable difference between AI creators from post-Soviet countries and Western creators?
Alissa: No. I follow a lot of creators abroad, and they also produce incredible AI videos with a real wow factor.
There is another difference, though. In post-Soviet countries, people take a much more systematic approach to running a blog. We pay enormous attention to Stories, preparing the audience before a product launch, and the launches themselves. There are now specialists for practically every task. An entire industry has formed around social media.
In that sense, our bloggers really do put a lot of effort into promotion and monetization. But foreign creators are every bit as good when it comes to ideas and visual creativity.
TCA: Why did you deliberately choose cartoons rather than realistic AI video?
Alissa: I see very clearly how negatively audiences can react to AI. The strongest rejection comes when artificial intelligence tries to imitate reality.
When I make a realistic AI video, it usually gets much less reach. I think viewers sense a kind of substitution, as though someone is trying to deceive them a little. But when I make a cartoon, a fairy-tale story, or an obviously imaginary visual experiment, people understand from the start that they are looking at AI, so there is no sense of deception.
Audiences respond to that kind of work much more easily and positively, so that is the direction I’m more interested in developing right now.
TCA: So AI can already create convincing images, but genuine empathy is still harder?
Alissa: Yes, artificial intelligence still has a very hard time conveying genuine human emotion. I’ve experimented with realistic videos designed to convey real emotions. Technically, AI can reproduce those actions, but viewers can still sense that what they are seeing isn’t real.
Once people understand that what they are watching is artificial intelligence — a machine, a computer — it becomes much harder for them to feel empathy for those characters. Maybe that will change in the future, but today, in my view, realistic AI content still has a very hard time evoking the same feelings as a real person.
TCA: Your father, Daniil Kamorskiy, worked in radio for many years. What does he think about your interest in AI?
Alissa: He doesn’t accept it at all and is my complete opposite on this issue. My dad is very traditional, and although he is proud of me, he hopes my interest in AI is just a phase and that I’ll soon give up my “plastic art.”
You can understand him. My dad’s current lifestyle is very far removed from social media and modern digital culture. He can spend two weeks in the mountains, he travels, and he grows his own vegetables. He is happy about my success, but our lifestyles and attitudes toward AI are almost complete opposites, and I find that pretty funny.
TCA: You also read a lot and love movies. Does that create a conflict between your own tastes and the content you make for millions of people?
Alissa: I read a lot of fiction, particularly classic literature, and I love movies. My blog used to be built around those interests. I constantly wanted to make references and talk about books, films, and more complex ideas.
But that strategy hardly works at all for a mass-market blog. That kind of content can thrive within its own niche, but then you’re talking about a few thousand interested people rather than 30 million views.
So at some point I decided to separate those two spaces. There is my personal life, where I still have books, literature, movies, and everything I’m personally interested in, and there is the blog as my job. On the blog, I focus primarily on the audience and what interests them, even if some of the topics or humor don’t particularly appeal to me.
TCA: So what is the main secret of a viral video?
Alissa: On social media, you either have to give people something useful or make them feel something. Dry information by itself interests almost no one today.
Triggering an emotion is easier, but ordinary marketing principles apply here. Before creating a video, you need to understand what emotion you want to evoke. It could be joy, sentimentality, sadness, or disgust. Whether the emotion is positive or negative isn’t really that important. What matters is that the viewer genuinely feels something, because that is what makes the content grab them and provoke a reaction.
It works much like it does in movies. You can watch a film that makes you feel horror or disgust, and even if those sensations are unpleasant, the film has still done its job by engaging you emotionally. Reels work on the same principle, except everything happens much faster and is a little more primitive.
