Edits of the piece, dubbed over with music that is branded nostalgic and sad, have blown up across social media platforms like Facebook and Tiktok. Tiktoks are generally less than a minute long and communicates with its audience through small snippets and clips, meaning that every second has to count to make an impression. It is meant to overwhelm you and draw you in. Looking through the comment sections of videos of Can't Help Myself that have gone viral, I've found that people were rather polarized. Their responses can, generally, be grouped into three categories: 

Group 1: This group of viewers were exceedingly empathetic to the piece with responses including the following:
User: destiny.daichi, “il a l'air si fatiguée (j'ai de l'empathie pour un robot maintenant super)”
User: Artemissii, "the way I see this piece of art is how it relates to me. Trying to keep itself together so it doesn’t fall apart."
User: Arrtem.bozos, “it died in 2019- poor thing..”  

Group 2: The second kind are those who are downright offended/ poke fun at the previous group. 
User: Oso24177, “it's a mechanical machine, not a living entity. Why say it'll die as if to propagate that it's alive? ”
User: Chadblake6, “Y’all saying died like it was alive”**

Group 3: The final group critique other people’s interpretation based on what they believe the artist intended the work to be read as. There is the defending of it as a metaphor for political/nation surveillance, but also a general sense of unrest over simply other emotional interpretations.
User: Codyj.24, “Trust me google it. My art teacher who has a masters in art history taught us about it. It’s not like an emotional appeal thing. [...] I mean there is what the artist intends it to be and that’s what she teaches us. It is subjective that’s not it."

Group 1 projects onto the piece, and by giving it more human characteristics/ forms of empathy it is rendered more deserving of an empathetic response. Group 2 firmly sequestered it to the realm of the nonliving, making a choice between categories. For them there is no gray area. It is perfectly black and white. It shows they have a very clear understanding of what is living vs what is not and how 'nonliving' beings don't deserve the same empathetic response. Group 3 bring in their seemingly objective read based on how the artist’s intentions are understood. They bring in the idea of art ownership, where there is only one correct interpretation, which I would argue against. Art is subjective that can’t and shouldn’t be sequestered to one interpretation. My main take away from these groups is how they each approach the piece from different perspectives that somehow all still combine themes of categorizations, art, death, suffering, and empathy.    

** I want to quickly mention that these comments include emojis, however SCALAR does not support them so I could not include them.