Nervous-sama is one vtuber who stream? Minecraft and rhythm game Osu! on Twitch. But unlike most anime avatars, she is controlled by an artificial intelligence program, not a human. That makes her a prime concern for Twitch chat optouts, who can get her to respond with all sorts of questions, from innocent questions to 4chan trolls. In the first few threads, someone asked Neuro-sama about the Holocaust. “I’m not sure if I believe it,” she said.
It was one of the more infamous clips that went go viral online near the end of last month. When asked what she thinks about women’s rights, she said they don’t exist. How will she tackle the famous trolley ethics conundrum of philosophy? Throw a fat man on the rails. Often, however, she will go a long way without being drawn into the conversation by controversial or hateful remarks. In that way, she’s an impressive emulation of a Twitch streamer that bridges the gap between repeated jokes and edgelord antics.
“The controversial things she says are due to her trying to make witty and humorous remarks about whatever is said in the conversation, linking AI with human values is a big deal. field of ongoing research,” the creator of Neuro-sama, a game programmer named Vedal, recounts. Kotaku. “To combat this, I have been working hard since the first few streams to improve the power of the filters used on her. The data she learns is also manually curated to minimize negative biases. We also now have a bunch of Twitch chat moderators who check everything she says.”
Neuro-sama is not Vedal’s first AI. In fact, a version of her was first created many years ago with the express purpose of learning to play. Osu!, a free-to-play rhythm game in which you click shapes on the screen to the beat of anime music. While those sessions are also streamed, there are no interactive avatars or personalities. After the rise of big-name VTubers last year, Neuro-sama builds on Osu! the original project’s skills with a fully voiced Twitch performance can impress the audience.
This is the perfect time based on the recent love of the Internet with the ChatGPT chatbot powered by OpenAI, where users can send super specific text reminders and get strangely artistic answers back. Vedal won’t go into detail about how Neuro-sama learns and communicates, other than confirming that she relies on a large language model, having been “trained on large amounts of text on the internet”. Although not as complicated, the effect was convincing enough to attract thousands of viewers per stream.
She also recently beat the highest ranked person Osu! player, Mrekk, on December 28, although some fans of the game debated whether the human opponent was inappropriately selected by the song. Neuro-sama has moved in Minecrafta much more complicated game with more chance of unexpected moments when the player asks if melee combat is the best Super Smash Bros. and whether she stepped on them. The moderation tools also seem to be better.
“She chooses what to respond to in a limited amount of time,” says Vedal. “However, it should be noted that she will not be talking about the Holocaust as the filters have improved.” Instead, she is currently try to learn to sing.
