❘ Published: 2022-12-29T03:44:51
❘ Update: 2022-12-29T03:45:08
Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere on the internet these days, acting as art generators, chatbots and other forms of communication. Neuro-sama is an example of this, with the AI VTuber conquering Twitch and osu! at a time. But what does it say about the future of gaming, streaming and its relationship to AI?
On December 19, Neuro-sama was rebooted. The AI project, created by ‘Vedal987‘ originally in 2019, was on a mission to master the rhythm game osu!.
At the time, it was just a standalone program with no personality beyond the name. There was no character, and while it was streamed on Twitch for the sake of the circle click title’s devoted fandom, it hung around in its own niche.
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Fast forward four years, with AI now playing a more pervasive role in the online space, Neuro-sama is turning heads.
It is more than a socially unconscious program. Neuro-sama has a VTuber personality and model, all designed by Vedal and adapted via AI. Using one of the default settings VTube Studio rigs, Neuro now sits there all day on Twitch, playing through osu beatmaps and even interacting with chat on the hottest topics of the day.
Clips of her talking about xQc, clapping at Vedal, and more have already gone viral. She’s sensitive in a way — a clip of her talking about her need to take a shower got a lot of laughs. How does an AI take a shower?
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In just 10 days though, Neuro-sama has become the talk of the town in both osu! and VTubing circles for different reasons. She has already beaten the best current osu! world player, australian teen ‘mrekk’, in a 1v1 tournament style. As for his audience on Twitch, it has averaged nearly 2,000 viewers since the rebootincluding peaks above 4,000.
Vedal describes himself as “a student with a particular interest in AI”. Speaking to Dexerto, they said the idea to relaunch the Neuro-sama project as an AI VTuber came after talking to a friend about using chat models for streamers.
“A friend of mine had the idea of creating an AI Streamer using a large language model, and I thought it had quite the potential,” they said.
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Large language models (LLMs) are “pretrained on a lot of text from the internet, so they have a lot of knowledge,” Vedal explained. This large database allows for a better understanding of human communication —it can comb through billions of responses to see how to answer specific questions or interact in specific ways.
Vedal called Neuro-sama a fun experience. However, in VTubing, the mere mention of AI brings a lot of baggage.
Contrary to AI art programs infiltrating space, which artists say exploits their work, Vedal’s design doesn’t really break that line. He spent a lot of time fine-tuning Neuro’s personality before sending him live on Twitch. The model it uses is a fair use of VTube Studio. It’s all his work, or royalty free.
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“Later, I had the idea to combine it with my osu! An AI that I was already working to improve, and I relaunched it this year in particular because that’s when I finally finished doing it, ”he continued.
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“The VTuber aspect was an obvious choice to combine with AI because it’s much easier to control an avatar than trying to generate a video of a real person.”
The AI has already triumphed in other games. AlphaStar, a program designed to beat the world’s best Starcraft 2 playersknocked out some of the game’s greats in 2018. It used a “deep neural network” to get input from what’s on screen to then produce an in-game command, learn theory game play and strategies by playing random players on the ladder.
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Early reviews noted that while AlphaStar had a lower APM than some of the top players, it was more accurate and didn’t make as many unnecessary inputs.
The same was done in Dota 2 with OpenAI Five. It took him a few months to regularly beat the professional teams, but after two years the AI managed to beat the two-time international champions OG in April 2019.
Neuro-sama conquered osu! much faster: “It took 10 days for Neuro-sama to become arguably better than the best human osu player!” since she beat mrekk in the 1v1,” said Vedal. “AI totally has the power to be better than humans, even in really complex games.”
All of this begs the question: where does this lead for gaming and Vtubing’s relationship to artificial intelligence? Will it continue to be a “fun experience” or will our future performers all come from programs rather than a human behind the screen?
It’s as much about technology as it is about what the audience wants.
“I think there could be a market for AI streamers because they have certain qualities that streamers can’t have – they could stream 24/7, can be better than humans at games, could theoretically read every chat message,” they said.
“I have no idea if AI streamers have a place in the future of streaming or if streamers should be worried about their jobs. I guess most of the attention right now is due to novelty, but we will see.
And as for Neuro-sama, the project doesn’t stop there, with Vedal planning to expand its reach even further: “I intend to expand outside of osu! and make him play more games, as well as improve his intelligence (memory) and understanding of Twitch chat.
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