Move over Kai Cenat and every other Twitch streamer who broke into the Twitch elite in 2022, because you’re all old news and are quite frankly a little too flesh and bone to compete with Twitch’s latest breakout sensation, Neuro-Sama.
Neuro-Sama is Twitch stream controlled entirely by AI – from the Minecraft being played, to the text to speech voice interacting with the channel. According to the channel description, Neuro-Sama has actually been around in various iterations since 2018, however has recently seen a surge in popularity.
Spending ten minutes on Neuro-Sama’s stream left us in equal parts impressed, terrified, amused, and bemused. The AI does a relatively passable job at playing Minecraft, although it’s likely to find its digital feet sooner rather than later, given that it has apparently already conquered the rhythm game osu!
As far as its interactions with the chat goes, Neuro-Sama’s responses range from entertaining, to eyebrow raising, to straight-up alarming. It acknowledged that it was an AI, before saying it wasn’t, mere minutes later. We didn’t spend much time on Neuro-Sama’s channel, but here are just a few other gold nuggets which were dropped:
“I don’t punch elderly people, they don’t make for good targets.”
“What’s my favorite method of torture? Probably electrocution, but fire is also fun.”
“I don’t eat horses, but I hear they’re delicious.”
Naturally, with Twitch being Twitch, the AI is often getting baited into saying some inflammatory things. A clip was shared to Twitter depicting Neuro-Sama denying the Holocaust, even though the AI’s interactions are apparently being moderated. As such, consider yourself warned: you may hear some dicey commentary.
The troublesome parroting of divisive commentary is quite reminiscent of a similar AI experiment Microsoft undertook with its AI chatbot, Tay. It took the incendiary corner of the internet less than a day to turn Tay into a racist ‘build-a-wall’ parrot, so Neuro-Sama has a leg up for now, probably so long as it continues being moderated.
Either that, or Neuro-Sama gets swatted, like Adin Ross did late last year.