101–110 of 114 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what many western VTubers don't get, they see it as an "avatar" for themselves which is not what VTubing is. It's supposed to be a completely different persona with no connection to your real identity. It completely dilluted (and I would say even ruined) VTubing in the west.
Supposed by whom?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what many western VTubers don't get, they see it as an "avatar" for themselves which is not what VTubing is. It's supposed to be a completely different persona with no connection to your real identity. It completely dilluted (and I would say even ruined) VTubing in the west.
Maybe they do get it, but are choosing to lean more into the authenticity angle. An art form, a medium, evolves when new cultures and sub-cultures take it up and add their own stuff, both the creator and the audience. Maybe from their perspective they're correctly doing it their way, instead of, as in your perspective, failing to do it your way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand the draw of video anything at all; I never have. I can read information 100x faster than a video can provide and I just cannot possibly understand why anyone would want to sit through a 45 minute YouTube video that would have taken 1.5 pages of text. That said, I'm not at all opposed to OTHERS getting the information in the delivery method they prefer. Great; good for you. But! I don't want to see…
Interesting. I prefer video/audio for the same reason. But I watch most things on 1.5x or 1.8x speed. I'm not a particularly fast reader, so I prefer audio/video forms. Totally agree with you though about not thinking written form is inferior. I do still enjoy a good long form article. (Also I'm not including technical writing like documentation.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The two largest vtuber agencies/companies are publicly traded in Japan. Which makes their popularity as organic as the explosion of the K-Pop mania.
I have extremely bad news for you about the authenticity of pop stars, going back at least to the 1950's.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I enjoy a handful of streamers for a few reasons: * I get to experience games I wouldn't normally have time for: I work full time, and as much as I love games and always make time for them, I still have a finite amount of time to make and a solid chunk of that time has to be devoted to multiplayer games, since it's a big part of how I meet my social needs. And even then, some games that are quite fun to watch for me…
Not the parent, but I have the same question. Your reasons above could be said about streamers in general, but what about VTubers in particular appeals to you?
That's a bit... late to the party. I can't find when the article was published, but the phenomenon "went worldwide" several years ago by the means of COVID. These days the vtubing as an industry is in a somewhat stable state, if not a possible decline, going by viewership hours over the same period. Many big EN and JP names have already retired too.
For the big VTuber corporate brand, for sure. But the indie VTuber scene as exploded. It used to be fairly expensive to get in the hobby, and you needed to be technically savy or have someone be for you. Now there is a lot of free and open-source VTuber software that don't need complex setup, just a webcam. And you can easily commission a few hundred bucks an artist to get your whole character and animation. This mad…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's certainly possible someone could fake something like that for views, but I'm curious what you consider to be the tells that it's no longer an LLM behind the wheel?
Maybe it's LLM and human actor splitting work, but she looks too natural, too fast and too error-free to be LLM based since too long ago. Just their dictation -> thinking -> TTS loop is too fast to be LLM. Context awareness and character adherence is too perfect as well.
Even if it were a human, that would require both fast typing and a fast TTS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a bigger question, like why do people watch streamers in the first place. It's not for me personally but it's a huge worldwide multibillion industry so plenty of people enjoy it and / or aspire to be it.
I didn't get it when it first was a thing (like 15 years ago) but now I watch streams of esports/pvp and I watch longplays to scratch an itch for games I have no intention of putting the full time sink into but need to experience bits of the game (like FF7Remake). Being able to skip or passively consume the boring bits is good and it's less addictive than playing. Occasionally if they are genuinely funny or are a per…
But I can't stand streaming because the entire culture is infantile and lowest common denominator. It's the same problem I have with Short form video content and microblogging, that in order to optimally attract the large market that prefers that content, you have to do things that are extremely off putting to people with my interests.
So for example, anyone playing a game on twitch will be pushed, by chat and by the invisible hand of the attention market, to optimize for stupid things. Instead of a roguelike build that is good, you will make a roguelike build that is "memey" because that gets you a larger audience. There's an aura of forcing chaos and chat sycophancy. It encourages the kind of antisocial behavior that sucks, like people in twitch plays pokemon who spent the entire time trying to ruin it.
There's also the problem that half the platform seems to be just softcore porn. Or gambling now.
Many streamers also run a popular youtube channel, and you can recognize a massive difference between content made directly for long form youtube videos vs their streamed content. IMO the quality itself is drastically different.
Streamers who don't do those kinds of things remain niche.
If you're genuinely interested in becoming a Vtuber, the barrier to entry is surprisingly low. You don't necessarily need to commission a custom model or a unique character design. You can use one of the VR avatar generators, which is what my avatar is based on, or even start with a modified VR avatar if its license allows it. That's actually a pretty common approach in the indie scene.
As the article mentions, the market is definitely saturated, so I wouldn't go into it expecting to make a lot of money. For what it's worth, a large number of Vtubers don't even meet YouTube's monetization threshold. Personally, I think that's part of what makes the community interesting. I tend to enjoy following smaller creators more than the big agency names.
One thing I'd add is that I think the article overgeneralizes the AI topic a bit and leans more toward wishful thinking. A lot of the hesitation around AI, especially at major agencies, comes from the fact that their character designs are often commissioned from well known artists. That creates a relationship between the performer and the artist, often referred to as the "Mama" or "Papa" relationship, and there can be a lot of sensitivity around how those designs are used. To be fair, those dynamics can show up in plenty of situations besides AI.
If you don't have those constraints, people tend to be much more relaxed about AI. Some creators who rely heavily on fan art are naturally more opinionated about it than others, but it really varies from person to person.