>>37796558The golden age is still yet to come. Right now vtubing has gotten stuck in a rut and attracted many wrong fans that are just porn addicts or fad chasers. That most people think vtubing is streaming with an anime character really answers how you can know this. Next, some will mention Kizuna Ai but gloss over the fact that it was a team production, pre-recorded videos, and that it was inspired by the vocaloid scene. It was also not popular enough that everyone now can even claim to have known or cared who or what Kizuna Ai was. Vtubing needs a hard crash or soft crash before it can reformulate as a proper type of virtual mixed-media based on virtual characters.
I think some of the current wave will still be around for it, like ironmouse, pekora and suisei. Most people that had other goals in life will have moved on if and when they think they can get legitimacy as themselves in whatever industry, or find they can get more money. AI will definitely be part of the future but I haven't seen any sign that it is far enough to fully replace human operators within the next few decades. I think it's going to start with things like automating the production process, enhancing the content, using high quality voice banks for mapping the input voice to the character voice. It's going to be things like that years before we see decent attempts at AI vtubers. Just before that is going to be what people come to call the golden age of vtubing.
