[author
Zack Zwiezen
Nvidia offers new AI-based technology that replaces your real eyes with digital eyes that will never stop staring at your webcam. It’s very scary, and just one more sign of how you need to act online to become a popular streamer in 2023.
It’s like this: to succeed in the world of live streaming, you have to be “on” all the timealways “engaged” and never taking too many breaks for fear of reducing your potentially fickle audience. This can quickly lead to burnout. Time and time again we’ve seen big, medium and small streamers are losing their passion to play online games, leading to prolonged breaks, panic attacksand more. What if an AI-powered tool could help you simulate some of this all-important engagement? Enter Nvidia’s latest update to its broadcast software.
That set of tools is intended to help you look and sound better while you stream, with features like background removal and keyboard noise removal. Starting with this new version, you can, with the press of a button, apply fake AI-powered eyeballs to your real human face. And these new eyes will look directly at the camera at all times, allowing you to never stop “chatting” with your audience even when you’re reading your conversation or looking around your room. He looks wild and very scary!
Some have suggested that this technology could help people with autism who struggle to maintain eye contact during meetings and livestreams. And while I respect that use case, I wonder if that’s the path we want to take. I don’t think constant eye contact – especially scary, direct eye contact like this – is something we all need or should all want. I certainly don’t think sticking creepy AI eyes on everyone is a good thing. And as one tweet pointed out, that kind of static, dead stare is not what people look like when talking to large groups. Looking away or towards other people and cameras is natural and can be helpful and even important.
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Online reactions to this new technology included people freaking out at its creepy and bizarre appearance and pointing out how unnatural it felt. Even so, you can also find many more positive responses to the tweet above and other online examples of this strange new AI gadget: people are excited to know how it will help their YouTube videos or online broadcasts. live on Twitch, and happy to be able to read the chat or watch away from the stream, while their audience is tricked into thinking they’re still “engaged” with them. To me, this seems like a really unhealthy (and unsustainable) mindset that will eventually lead to more burnout than AI-based technology can fix, treat, or prevent.