No Encore
I started a talent business because I wanted to bet on the human back.
Idols stood on stage. Under the lights, in the flesh, sweating. The audience is there. Breathing the same air. A one-to-n relationship. Streaming turned that into n². Not just performer to viewer, but viewer to viewer. VTubers arrived, and the flesh became optional. A human exists behind the motion capture, but all you see is the avatar.
And so VTuber agencies print money.
What catches me is the platform's cut of donations. I get it — massive infrastructure costs money. But 30% goes to the platform. The performer's share gets split again with the agency. I was raised on the rule: watch out for any business with a house. How many agencies realize they are building on YouTube's sand? One policy change and the entire revenue structure blows away.
Then AITubers arrived.
Still experimental, but something nearly indistinguishable is coming soon. The LLM thinks of words. TTS turns them into voice. Lips sync to the audio. The body moves with emotion. A combination of existing technologies. Lip sync and facial expressions are mostly solved. Body movement hasn't caught up yet, but it's a matter of time.
Autonomous streaming. Twenty-four hours a day. No gaffes. Unless it goes haywire. No scandals. No sick days. No paycheck needed. The ideal performer, from management's perspective.
LLM dependency stacked on top of YouTube. A sandcastle going two stories tall.
Commercially, it will succeed. People pay for stories. Even when the storyteller doesn't exist.
Still, I have my doubts.
Not about the business. About whether the thing inside is human. There is a wall there that cannot be crossed.
People who are hurt, who cannot stand back up. When they rise again, what they see is a human back. Someone who was hurt the same way, who fell the same way, and stood up anyway. If they could do it, maybe I can too. That feeling does not come unless the other person is flesh and blood.
AI is too perfect. It doesn't get hurt. It doesn't fall. So the story of "standing up anyway" never forms. Be encouraged by something perfect, and all you think is: you and I are not the same.
Being incomplete. Being breakable. Carrying on regardless. The power a human back carries lives there and nowhere else.
The age of AITubers is coming. Let it come. But the discomfort of building a business on someone else's platform won't go away. The engineer's pulse quickens all the same.
The version of me that believes in human backs and runs a talent business, and the version that itches to prove that future through technology, are slugging it out right now.
TTS. I think I could build one.