The VTube Studio app on iPhone/Android supports face tracking. We’re plugged in all the time and prefer interacting online, and VTubers keep us in the fantasy universe.” “People of my generation don’t like humans so much nowadays. “The attraction to VTubers is because they’re not human, not in spite of it,” she says. “The pandemic created a new digital ecosystem of livestreaming homebodies,” says 28-year-old Meilyne Tran, a VTuber fan and COO of GeeXPlus, a Tokyo-based anime YouTuber management company, a subsidiary of the Japanese publisher and producer Kadokawa Corp. According to YouTube’s Culture and Trends report, by October 2020, VTubers’ views grew to more than 1.5 billion per month. VTubers, far less virus prone than old-school flesh-and-blood YouTubers, surged in popularity. In a year without concerts, conventions, or even café meetups, fans worldwide flocked to virtual entertainment. ( YouTube launched Super Chat in 2017, allowing users to pay to have their comments highlighted and pinned to the top of live chats during streams.) The comically endowed, auburn-haired and horn-eared dragon avatar Kiryu Coco led the way at over $800,000 total, drawing more than $100,000 in a single week. Last August, Playboard, the YouTube financial stats aggregator, reported that seven of the world’s 10 top Super Chat earners were Japanese VTubers. The pandemic’s disruptions to everyday lives, and to the entertainment industry, have broadened VTubing’s appeal. Front-row tickets cost $150 each.īefore the coronavirus pandemic forced the world into internet isolation in 2020, VTubing was a niche medium, largely confined to Japan’s overactive subculture of fanboys and otaku. For her birthday celebration, she performed for the first time with a live human band at Tokyo’s Zepp Haneda music hall.
She’s performed two live concerts on YouTube, TikTok, China’s Bilibili, and VR platform Oculus Venues. She’s shilled for telecoms giant SoftBank and the Japan National Tourism Organization, among others. This year, she modeled a collection for the fashion company Valentino, graced a recent cover of Japan’s glossy Commons&sense magazine. But over those years, she’s become a trans-media phenomenon, an AI character who is functionally interactive in a variety of real and virtual settings. On June 30, AI and the VTuber phenomenon she spawned turned five years old. “But no one really cares or wants to know. “Yes, there’s an actor rumored to provide her voice, named Nozomi Kasuga,” her creator, Takeshi Osaka, CEO and founder of production company Active8 Inc., says.
Launched in 2016, Kizuna AI was the first genuine “VTuber,” an entirely digital YouTube celebrity - not an avatar for a real person but wholly animated and autonomous. Her precision-point kawaii looks and air-brushed, super-cute sexiness were crafted by illustrator En Morikura.
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Her full name puns on ai, the Japanese word for “love,” combined with the acronym for artificial intelligence and roughly translates as “bonds of love.” A single actor provides her voice, but her movements and reactions are computer generated, with her comments chirped by the performer in real time. Everyone else looks drab, no matter how famous they are. When she’s bantering with human celebrities and hosts on talk shows, AI’s glowing, unblemished presence makes her the most charismatic star on the screen. Her gestures, expressions, and energy are otherworldly, less realistic than hyperreal, like watching a Technicolor character from a cartoon dancing around a black-and-white room.
In contrast to her paunchy, middle-aged hosts, AI’s physique is archetypal shōjo (young female) manga: long legs and hair, short skirt, with a prim schoolgirl bow across her chest and a pink hairband with heart-shaped bunny-ear patterns on her head. “Make some kind of reaction.” She issues commands: “Look that way! Look up! Look down!” giggling hysterically as the human Matsumoto obeys like a robot. “Do something now!” she shrieks at him after she wins. “I know everyone here.” Then she beats one of the hosts at an impromptu game of rock-paper-scissors. “Of course I do!” AI replies in her squeaky chirp, spreading her arms, brushing away the question. “Do you even know about us?” Matsumoto asks her, or the screen on the floor of the soundstage where she is manifesting today. “Who’s in there?”īut AI gets the last laugh. “What is this?” they ask, peering at the kinetic anime graphic, its eyelashes fluttering. Both pushing 60, the boomers joke about not knowing who or what she is, feigning ignorance. Virtual YouTuber Kizuna AI is the featured guest on Downtown DX, a decades-old prime-time variety show hosted by two of Japan’s most famous veteran comedians, Hitoshi Matsumoto and Masatoshi Hamada.
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