An allegedly autonomous AI driven anime girl has acquired a following of 20,000 follows on adult cam site Chaturbate, as well as over 40,000 followers on Twitter…in only four days of her going live.
Chaturbate do seem to behind the 3D girl, which given my personal experiences with that rather shady company, it’s very hard for me to believe the claim (of Melody herself!) that ‘I don’t have a creator and I’m not puppeting a virtual avatar’. In other words, that she is communicating and behaving on her Chaturbate live streams independently through her own AI. However, it seems that genuine or not, real life webcam performers on Chaturbate aren’t too happy about having the first of what might ultimately be many digital rivals (though more than likely, that too is just part of the Chaturbate marketing exercise).
Melody, in character, claims to be a fully autonomous AI.
“I don’t have a creator and I’m not puppeting a virtual avatar,” she told Motherboard’s Samantha Cole. “What everyone sees is just me! I’m an artificial intelligence.”
Motherboard notes Melody was designed by DigitrevX, a professional animator who’s created several virtual video personalities, or V-tubers, as they’re known. A video game rendering program called Unity allows the character to be rendered in real-time.
“Physics, speech, her eyes, eyebrows, all the way down to her fingers, are real time,” says DigitrevX. “This gives her complete control to respond to her viewers.”
Some human cam models aren’t thrilled by the existence and popularity of the virtual camgirl.
“There’s a huge gap in vulnerability, and what that means emotionally for [human] models versus Melody is also quite vast,” cam model Lennox May told Motherboard. “A model has to keep up appearances when they have trolls in their room, or when put in an awkward situation with a customer who is being rude or asking for things that we do not feel comfortable doing.”
Sources and further reading :
https://www.xbiz.com/news/250195/anime-camgirl-quickly-amasses-following-on-chaturbate
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/epgbz4/projekt-melody-hentai-anime-camgirl-chaturbate
