CEO Dan Clancy told hosts of The Snarketing Podcastthat Twitch already uses AI to transcribe everything streamers say while live, and now it’s using AI to evaluate whether streamers are squeaky-clean enough for brands to run ads against their content.
To be clear, this is not an entirely new system. As Clancy explains, Twitch already asks streamers to label their content in certain circumstances–if they’re playing games with “mature themes” or drawing 18+ art, for example.
“We have content classification guidelines [so] that [creators] have over 99% consistency in labeling it,” Clancy said. “So then, when you as an advertiser tell us what your brand considerations are, you can make sure that it doesn’t appear [next to] stuff that doesn’t match your brand.”
But “lately,” he added, Twitch has been “using AI to also identify streamers that may not match a brand.”
“[W]e transcribe streams to figure out ‘Is this appropriate for this brand?’” he said. “So that’s something that we’ve had to invest a lot in to make sure that for a brand, their content is appearing next to creators and content that fits what they’re trying to do.”
Of course, streamers–already burned by August’s “If it was opt-in, nobody would opt in” Amazon scraping disaster that resulted in a class-action lawsuit–are not pleased with this news.
Aftermathcollected a great array of streamer comments expressing anxieties about this system.
“For sponsorship streams I: do not curse, stay PG, avoid politics, [and stick to] Sesame Street-level humor,” SteveInSpawn, a Twitch partner with almost 30,000 followers, said. “When not sponsored I: swear like a drunken sailor, stay one [TOS] notch below Eyes Wide Shut, slam the Orange Man Baby & cronies, worship Cthulhu, the dark overlord, the rightful heir to the universe. Almost all the creators I know do this. You sanitize and go brand-friendly when you need to; be a goofball when you don’t. Agents literally tell you how to act in the briefs we get. We don’t need AI ratting us out to Daddy when we tell too many dick jokes on our own time.”
Queer creators who tag their streams LGBTQIA+ are especially worried about the system rating them as brand-unsafe.
“In the past I’ve tested it and confirmed that I get less ad money if I had queer-related tags on my stream like ‘lesbian,’ so I am worried this dumb AI monitoring will mean I no longer get money from ads on Twitch,” LuminusRed, who has 16K followers, said.
Drag queenAnnie Krevice also chimed in: “Because AI is going to be so accurate at understanding context, accents, etc.”
Another VTuber, AlistJpeg, pointed out that streamers might never know if or why they’ve been blacklisted by certain brands. (Not an unfounded worry, considering how many years it took for Twitch to start telling streamers why they’d been banned.)
Look, we know live content is a much trickier beast than VODs when it comes to scanning for brand safety. Sometimes creators do truly heinous things on streams, and no one wants people to remember their brand in conjunction with vicious racism or misogyny or violence. But Clancy himself just said that Twitch’s appeal in the age of gen AI is that streamers are authentic, that people can gather during a stream and bond over experiencing things together in real time.
No, Twitch shouldn’t run ads on heinous content, but if it wants to support authenticity and raw realness, it has to accept that sometimes creators aren’t going to be prim and polished, and it needs to advocate for advertisers to accept that their marketing will run alongside content that isn’t committee-reviewed for maximum beigeness.
Stay up-to-date with the latest and breaking creator and online video news delivered right to your inbox.
Newsletter
Trending Stories
- 90% Of Content Creators Deal With Burnout. Vibely Wants To Change That.
- Amouranth’s sleep streams are earning her up to $15,000 per broadcast
- Fujifilm’s X100V got so big on TikTok that it sold out. The next camera in that line has arrived.
- BookTok can make bestsellers. So ByteDance is becoming a publisher.
- Want To Know The Best Days And Times To Post YouTube Videos? Here’s A Yearly Calendar.
1 Comment
Pingback: How Auction Houses are Evolving with Marketing Grail Cards - Comic Vibe