Neuro-sama is a VTuber who is streaming Minecraft and the rhythm game OK! on twitch. But unlike most anime avatars, she is controlled by an artificial intelligence program and not a human. That makes them catnip for Twitch chat dwellers, who can prompt them to respond with all sorts of questions, ranging from innocent requests to 4chan trolling. Within the first few streams, someone had already asked Neuro-sama about the Holocaust. “I’m not sure I can believe it,” she said.
That was one of the more notorious clips to go viral on the internet towards the end of last month. When asked what she thought of women’s rights, she said they didn’t exist. How would she solve philosophy’s famous ethical riddle? Throw a fat person on the tracks. However, she will often go a long way without letting the chat tempt her into making controversial or hateful remarks. In that way, she’s an impressive simulacrum of a Twitch streamer bridging the gap between repetitive banter and Edgelord antics.
“The controversial things she says is because she tries to make witty and comical remarks about everything that is said in the chat. Alignment of AIs with human values is an ongoing area of research,” Neuro-sama’s creator, a game programmer named Vedal, told my city. “To counteract this, I’ve been working hard since the first few streams to improve the strength of the filters used on them. Data it learns from is also manually curated to mitigate negative bias. We also now have a team of people who moderate the Twitch chat and check everything she says.”
Neuro-sama isn’t Val’s first AI. In fact, a version of her was first created years ago with the express purpose of learning to play OK!, a long-running free-to-play rhythm game where you click shapes on a screen to the beat of anime music. While these sessions were also streamed, there was no avatar or interactive personality. After last year’s surge of big-name VTubers, Neuro-sama is building on the OK! Capabilities of the original project with a fully voiced twitch performance capable of riffing with the audience.
It’s perfect timing given the internet’s recent love affair with the OpenAI-powered ChatGPT chatbot, which has allowed users to do this Send hyper-specific text prompts and receive incredibly artful answers in return. Vedal would not go into detail about how Neuro-sama learns and communicates, except to confirm that it relies on a large language model that was “trained on a large body of text on the Internet.” While not as sophisticated, the effect was compelling enough for Neuro-sama to reach thousands of viewers per stream.
She also recently defeated the first place finishers OK! player Mrekk, on December 28th, although some fans of the game debate whether the human opponent was ill-served with the song choices. Neuro-sama has since moved on Minecrafta much more complex game with a lot more possibilities for unexpected moments when players wonder if melee is the best Super Smash Bros. and if she will step on it. The moderation tools are apparently better now too.
“She chooses what to respond to within a limited window,” Vedal said. “However, it should be noted that she will not be speaking about the Holocaust as the filters have been improved.” Instead, she is currently trying to learn how to sing.
