Amidst mostly unfounded fears that artificial intelligence is coming for our jobs, it turns out there’s one gig AI is pretty excellent at: streaming on Twitch.
Meet Neuro-sama, a cutesy AI-powered character which is now the top streamer on Twitch by active subscriber-count, according to Twitch Tracker. At the time of writing, Nuero-sama — streaming via the Twitch channel Vedal987 — has 165,268 paid active subscribers, well above the second-highest channel, the human-ran Jynxzi.
On Twitch, each paid subscriber is valued at $5 a month, some of which is split with Twitch. According to an estimate by Dextero, that means Neuro-sama is raking in at least $400,000 a month just from subscriptions — and that’s on top of random viewer donations, sponsorships, and ad revenue.
Over the past few years, content creators known as VTubers have taken Twitch by storm. VTubers are essentially like regular streamers, except they use digital motion-capture effects to alter their voice and appearance, often taking on cartoon-like personas to stand out and appeal to viewers looking for something beyond the physical realm.
Neuro-sama takes the concept one step beyond. Despite appearances, the avatar isn’t merely puppeted by a human streamer, but is entirely AI-generated. The channel’s owner, identified only by the handle Vedal, has been running the channel as his full-time job since at least 2023, according to Bloomberg.
Per the publication’s reporting, the avatar’s speech is first generated by a large language model (LLM) before being converted to audio via another text-to-speech AI application.
Though the AI avatar was originally designed to live-stream the rhythm game Osu, it has since developed a life of its own, discussing random topics with various subscribers who communicate with the LLM via Twitch’s baked-in live chat features.
“Part of it is definitely the novelty,” Vedal told Bloomberg of the character’s popularity at the time. “Part of it is some of the things she says. She can be quite chaotic, saying things humans wouldn’t really say.”
Though Neuro-sama sits atop the Twitch throne at the moment, there is still a ways to go if the channel is ever to become the all-time subscription record holder: it sits at number eight on that list — still an accomplishment that was once unthinkable.
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