Currently, artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere on the Internet, acting as generators of art, chatbots and other forms of communication. Neuro-sama is an example of this: VTuber AI defeats Twitch and osu! at the same time. But what does he say about the future of gaming, streaming, and their connection to AI?
On December 19, Neuro-sama was rebooted. The AI project, created by Vedal987 back in 2019, set itself the task of mastering the rhythm game osu!.
Then it was just a separate program with no personality other than the name. There was no character, and although it was broadcast on Twitch in the interests of the title’s dedicated fandom clicking around, it hung in its own niche.
Fast forward four years, when AI is playing an increasingly important role in the online space, and Neuro-sama is attracting attention.
It is more than a socially uninformed program. Neuro-sama has a personality and a VTuber model, created by Vedal and adapted with the help of AI. Using one of the standard VTube Studio installations, Neuro now sits there all day on Twitch, playing osu bitmaps and even chatting on the hottest topics of the day.
Clips in which she talks about xQc, applauds Vedal and much more have already gone viral. She’s kind of reasonable — one clip in which she talks about having to take a shower caused many to laugh. How does the AI take a shower?
However, in just 10 days, Neuro-sama became a byword in both osu! and VTubing mugs for various reasons. She has already beaten the current top wasp! The player of the world, the Australian teenager mrekk, is in a 1-on-1 tournament style. As for her audience on Twitch, since the reboot she has had an average of about 2,000 viewers, including peaks above 4,000.
incoming transmission from neuro-sama @mrekkosu pic.twitter.com/Wfv4NxykJ3
— Vedal (@Vedal987) December 28, 2022
Vedal is a self—proclaimed “student with a special interest in AI.” In a conversation with Dexerto, they said that the idea to revive the Neuro-sama project as an AI VTuber arose after a conversation with a friend about using chat models for streamers.
“One of my friends had the idea to create an AI streamer using a large language model, and I thought it had potential,” they said.
Large Language models (LLM) “are pre—trained on a large amount of text from the Internet, so they have a lot of knowledge,” Vedal explained. This large database allows you to better understand human communication — it can view trillions of responses to see how to answer specific questions or interact in a certain way.
Vedal called Neuro-sama one funny experiment. However, in VTubing, the mere mention of artificial intelligence carries with it a lot of mistakes.
Unlike artificial intelligence art programs that penetrate into space, which, according to artists, exploit their work, the design of the Portal does not actually violate this line. He spent a lot of time fine-tuning Neuro’s personality before sending it live on Twitch. The model it uses is a fair use of VTube Studio. These are all his works, or without copyright.
“Later I had the idea to combine it with my osu! AI, which I was already working on improving, and I revived it, in particular, this year, because that’s when I finally finished making it,” he continued.
“The VTuber aspect was an obvious choice to combine with AI because it’s much easier to control an avatar than trying to create a video of a real person.”
AI has already won other games. AlphaStar, a program designed to beat the world’s best players in Starcraft 2, beat some of the best in the game back in 2018. She used a “deep neural network” to get input from what was on the screen, for the subsequent output of the command in the game. , studying game theory and strategy, playing with random players in ladderer.
Early reviews noted that although AlphaStar’s APM was lower than some of the best players, it was more accurate and also didn’t make as many unnecessary inputs.
The same was achieved in Dota 2 with OpenAI Five. It took him several months to constantly beat professional teams, but two years later, AI managed to defeat the two-time champions of The International OG in April 2019.
Neuro-sama defeated the Wasp! much faster: “It took Neuro-sama 10 days to become, perhaps, better than the best human player in osu! since she defeated mrekk in a 1-on-1 battle,” Vedal said. “AI has every chance to be better than humans even in very difficult games.”
All this raises the question: what does this lead to in relation to games and VTubing to artificial intelligence? Will it continue to be a “fun experiment”, or will all our future artists appear from programs, and not from the person behind the screen?
It’s a question of both technology and what the audience wants.
“I think there may be a market for AI streamers, because they have some qualities that streamers cannot have – they can broadcast 24/7, they can be better than people in games, theoretically they can read every chat message,” they said.
“I have no idea if artificial intelligence streamers have a place in the future of streaming or if streamers should worry about their jobs. I guess most of the attention at the moment is due to its novelty, but we’ll see.”
And as for Neuro-sama, the project does not end there, because Vedal plans to further expand its presence: “I intend to go beyond the osu! and let her play more games, as well as improve her intelligence (memory) and understanding of Twitch chat.”
