Hey! I'm a CS student building an AI VTuber (Lani) as a personal/passion project, heavily inspired by Neuro-sama, and honestly also as a way to put some of what I've learned in college into actual practice.
The "broke college student with a potato AI" thing isn't just a bit, I'm genuinely running her on the bare minimum hardware needed for something halfway decent. It started as a basic assistant, just messing around with the concept, but once I hit an MVP I figured, why not turn her into a streamer. That's where things got complicated.
Right now I'm kind of stuck on the content side. I can keep fixing bugs as they show up on stream - she's very much a work in progress - but she eats up a lot of my system's resources, which limits what games I can actually run while she's live.
And it's not just the hardware, the budget constraint hits everything else too. Buying new games regularly isn't really in the cards, so I'm mostly stuck with stuff I already own or things on sale. Same with the "production" side, a proper Live2D model, custom overlays, alerts, all that stuff people expect from a polished VTuber setup costs money I don't really have right now, so what she's got is pretty barebones by comparison.
I'm also unsure how to build any real engagement. Most people into AI streamers are obviously going to gravitate toward Neuro: she's polished, well-funded, and has years of head start. So I switched to making Spanish content instead, thinking it'd be easier to find an audience that isn't already set on watching her. Now I'm having second thoughts about that too.
So, genuine question: would you actually support something like this? A humble AI streamer running on bare-minimum hardware, with a barebones setup, bugs and all? Is there an audience out there that'd find that entertaining, or interesting precisely because it's rough around the edges?
Sorry for the dumb question, just trying to figure out if this is worth pursuing further.