Senior Software Development Engineer at Nintendo of America. (Comments/Contents are of my personal opinion.)
A Vtuber.
Favorite IDEs: VSCode, JetBrains
Favorite software: Blender, Krita
Sexuality: Demisexual
My Discord ID: @hsaito
My Threema ID: https://threema.id/JEJVFX9F
OpenPGP: 67F93ACB4FABDBFF7C38972CE418114A89FFFFA9
Other contacts options, please visit my website:
https://hidekisaito.com/
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/unsignedint; my proof: https://keybase.io/unsignedint/sigs/0DTr7vikkFaZO5RzmKqlD0SiaalWXpAFrZEjz3jHOsU ]
I have a clear, specific stance (generally pro-AI, with nuance) and I don’t engage with common fallacies. You’re unlikely to persuade me, and I’m not here to change your mind either. Disagreement is fine; bad-faith or malicious engagement isn’t welcome.
> In general they also don't seem to collaborate much with vtubers outside of their space, so I'm sure there are some rules in play there.
I think it's more about market dynamics than strict rules.
There are clear benefits to collaborating within the same agency because it helps introduce audiences to other talents under the same umbrella. Everyone involved has a chance to grow together.
Once you start collaborating outside the agency, you're inevitably splitting viewers' time, attention, and even spending across different groups. Since every fan only has so much time and money to go around, those collaborations don't always make business sense.
That's not to say they never happen. If a collaboration is expected to bring in new audiences, significantly increase exposure, or otherwise benefit both sides, then it's much easier to justify. But without that kind of upside, it can end up helping another agency just as much, or even more, than your own.
I'm a Vtuber myself. I'm an indie, self supported, just for fun type rather than someone trying to make a living from it.
If you're genuinely interested in becoming a Vtuber, the barrier to entry is surprisingly low. You don't necessarily need to commission a custom model or a unique character design. You can use one of the VR avatar generators, which is what my avatar is based on, or even start with a modified VR avatar if its license allows it. That's actually a pretty common approach in the indie scene.
As the article mentions, the market is definitely saturated, so I wouldn't go into it expecting to make a lot of money. For what it's worth, a large number of Vtubers don't even meet YouTube's monetization threshold. Personally, I think that's part of what makes the community interesting. I tend to enjoy following smaller creators more than the big agency names.
One thing I'd add is that I think the article overgeneralizes the AI topic a bit and leans more toward wishful thinking. A lot of the hesitation around AI, especially at major agencies, comes from the fact that their character designs are often commissioned from well known artists. That creates a relationship between the performer and the artist, often referred to as the "Mama" or "Papa" relationship, and there can be a lot of sensitivity around how those designs are used. To be fair, those dynamics can show up in plenty of situations besides AI.
If you don't have those constraints, people tend to be much more relaxed about AI. Some creators who rely heavily on fan art are naturally more opinionated about it than others, but it really varies from person to person.
The way I've come to think about Blender, and to some extent other tools in the same space, is that being a master of the tool as an operator and having the artistic ability to create meaningful work are two different skills. The best artists often have a good balance of both, but plenty of people are much stronger in one area than the other.
Since Blender is free, I think it's attracted a lot of people whose strengths are heavily weighted toward one side or the other.
Going back to the soccer analogy, you might be incredibly good at kicking the ball, but playing competitively and making meaningful plays on the field requires a completely different set of skills.
I'm feeling the same way. People naturally pick up writing habits from what they read, especially if they haven't really developed their own style yet. So it seems only natural that, after spending a lot of time reading AI generated text, some of those patterns start creeping into their own writing.
The less established someone's writing style or vocabulary is, the more susceptible they probably are to that influence. I don't necessarily see it as inherently good or bad. People have always picked up habits from the things they read. AI is just another source of influence, alongside books, blogs, journalists, or other writers. Some influences are great, and some are less so.
Of course, they can't realistically police every use of AI any more than they can police someone using Grammarly or similar tools. I think the core of the argument is really about drawing a hard line against low-quality "write a response for me" type usage.
In reality, people are going to keep doing that no matter what. But at the same time, it's still probably a worthwhile line to draw when it comes to discouraging more irresponsible or disengaged uses of AI.
While things like the expectation of lifetime employment (or at least very long tenure) may sound appealing, it also creates a job market with very low fluidity. In practice, if you miss that narrow “fresh out of school” hiring window, you can end up facing pretty unfavorable prospects later on.
People can still get hired mid-career, of course, but many companies traditionally hire based more on long-term potential than immediately usable skills, since they expect to train employees heavily through OJT. That also means the number of openings for experienced hires can be relatively limited. And because of the seniority-based structure, even experienced workers may end up starting near the bottom anyway.
There was an entire generation of people who missed that initial hiring window because of economic downturns and hiring freezes, and many of them still struggle to land stable permanent positions even today.
Things are gradually changing, but many structural assumptions are still there. For example, parts of the legal and employment system are historically built around the assumption of lifetime employment, which also makes it difficult for companies to dismiss permanent employees once they are hired.
I'd argue there's really no way to make OpenClaw truly safe, no matter what you do. The only place it really makes sense is within trusted environments, like B2B coordination or tightly controlled processes between systems that share the same assumptions.
The moment it steps outside that boundary, you're sending the bot into unpredictable territory. At that point, things can get ambiguous pretty quickly, and in some cases even adversarial.
The article does a good job calling out the more serious offenses, although I’d personally argue that nigiribashi is just as bad as the other two. Most Japanese people would probably react with a bit of shock to those.
That said, chopstick etiquette is definitely evolving. Something like chobujubashi isn’t enforced as strictly anymore, especially with more awareness around left-handed users. Kaeshibashi, on the other hand, is becoming more common, and in some social circles, not doing it can actually come across as rude.
Not only have there been those cancellations, but they’ve also been cutting back features in a lot of areas, especially in the Pro tier, and doing it pretty drastically without any notice. Honestly, I think that might be the bigger issue, particularly since many of the affected users are paying customers, and quite a few of them paid for a full year upfront.
I think the only practical litmus test here is whether you can stand by the text as your own words. It’s not like we have someone looking over commenters’ shoulders as they type.
Ultimately, this comes down to people making a good-faith judgment about how much AI was involved, whether it was just minor grammatical fixes or something more substantial. The reality is that there isn’t really a shared consensus on exactly where that line should be drawn.
I guess this kind of rule feels less pragmatic and more philosophical. For one thing, it’s nearly impossible to enforce in practice, and drawing a clear line between simple grammatical correction and AI-assisted editing is a pretty hard problem.
Just my take: I don’t think “AI” automatically equals “slop.” There’s plenty of human-made slop too, and some AI-assisted content is genuinely useful. I’d rather see this framed as “report low-value/spammy content” than “report AI slop,” since the AI label tends to turn into “this looks AI” witch-hunting. That said, our baseline assumptions seem pretty different here, so we probably won’t fully agree.
I think this really needs to be framed as a "report low-quality content" feature, not a "report AI slop" feature. Otherwise, it just incentivizes people to hide their process, and it risks turning into a witch hunt where everything gets judged on whether it "looks AI" rather than whether it’s actually bad content.
I think part of it is that, in the US (and probably in many other countries too), the roles of maker and consumer tend to be more clearly separated. In contrast, among Japanese users, that line feels much more blurred.
One thing I’ve noticed is that there are a lot of “avatar worlds” where people just go in and pick premade avatars, but these are almost nonexistent—or at least not widely used—by Japanese audiences. The main exception seems to be worlds specifically designed for trying on sample avatars, rather than adopting them as-is.
Senior Software Development Engineer at Nintendo of America. (Comments/Contents are of my personal opinion.)
A Vtuber.
Favorite IDEs: VSCode, JetBrains Favorite software: Blender, Krita Sexuality: Demisexual
My Discord ID: @hsaito
My Threema ID: https://threema.id/JEJVFX9F
OpenPGP: 67F93ACB4FABDBFF7C38972CE418114A89FFFFA9
Other contacts options, please visit my website: https://hidekisaito.com/
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/unsignedint; my proof: https://keybase.io/unsignedint/sigs/0DTr7vikkFaZO5RzmKqlD0SiaalWXpAFrZEjz3jHOsU ]
I have a clear, specific stance (generally pro-AI, with nuance) and I don’t engage with common fallacies. You’re unlikely to persuade me, and I’m not here to change your mind either. Disagreement is fine; bad-faith or malicious engagement isn’t welcome.
https://medium.com/@unsignedint/where-i-stand-on-generative-ai-and-why-im-not-here-to-negotiate-it-bbf229e7a4f2