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Twitch allowing more nudity after disproportionately banning female streamers. Twitch confirmed its policy banning nudity was sexist.
Of course, on seeing this news I immediately wondered why it would count as "punishing" women to prevent them from doing something men don't generally have the option of doing (that is, making money by flashing breasts). Why don't we say it "levels the playing field" to prevent women from using their sex appeal to crush their competitors on a gaming platform? I was going to do a great Simpsons callback and everything, "Twitch became a hardcore pornography platform so gradually I didn't even notice," I had this whole post I was going to write about the sexual appeal of females versus males, maybe do a little amateur evo-psych ("as a treat!")--
--and then the whiplash hit.
Twitch Reverses Policy Allowing ‘Artistic Nudity,’ Citing AI’s Ability to Create Realistic Images
Here is Twitch's reversal of its... reversal? The meat is straightforward:
I guess someone realized that if you allow streamers to turn your site into OnlyFans with Vidya, then the women are going to drop their tops and the men are going to just... use filters? (I don't actually know, I don't use Twitch because I play video games and have no interest in watching others do so, but I am decrepit and out of touch so whatever. I have an Amazon Prime account so sometimes I pop over to Twitch if there's an incentive or something but otherwise it's a mystery to me.)
Now I'm left pondering the apparent Fisherian runaway of human beings trying to become--virtually, at least--teenage-presenting (cat?)girls as quickly as possible. I hadn't previously considered the impact of AI on parasocial human relationships, and now I'm having a hard time considering anything else. But I also have to wonder--is the new policy re-sexist? Will it make any difference at all?
EDIT: From the helpful comments below, today I learned that Twitch is not just a video game streaming site, but also streams other activities like art creation; that the AI nudity concerns are not limited to filters/avatars but to art being produced on Twitch; and that Twitch's reverse-course was likely driven at least as much by AI "nudification" concerns as anything. I remain interested in the thought processes that led to the first change-in-policy, and in knowing what (if anything) actually happened on the server side to cause the rapid about-face! But I appreciate having the bits I did not understand explained to me.
Some of the controversy was essentially around twitch thots, who weren't necessarily bad at gaming but probably weren't attracting viewers for that purpose: Morgpie, the streamer that Ars Technica highlights, is also pornhub porn star, and her ouvre is... pretty clearly about her changing between various bikini-levels sets of clothes, interspersed with gatcha-level artwork.
((That's not to diss her on it. I'm kinda impressed, tbh. Five hours is a long fucking stream for everyone involved doing that. And I can empathize more with a casual nudity kink that a lot of others, even if her version's not my thing in a few different ways.))
Male versions exist, enough that /r/gaymers occasionally has people asking for recs. That said, the male streamers can and did get banned for doing 'the same thing': male nip slips or topless shots are prohibited. It's not clear how uniformly that's enforced, but they're also such a small minority that uniform enforcement would still be a vastly larger impact for direct numbers on women.
That said:
I think the AI concerns weren't just about v-tubers using filters over their own actions to make nude- or nude-adjacent personas, but also about material unrelated to the streamer themselves, especially as photo-realistic portrayals get more achievable. It's probably not as good money as going after the parasocial paraphilias, but it's a lot lower-cost.
((I think there's also something going on with AI art at the Operation Choke Point level where the Ashcroft dissent and ML-gen specific concerns about data-as-'collage' are backstage threats, but I can't prove it and it's probably undisprovable.))
I was kinda hoping to see the Fisherian runaway of increasingly bizarre nude-but-not-sex-itself stuff, since the 'artistic' nudity policy still prohibited sexual content, even for in-game or illustrated. the average version would probably still be pretty boring -- teenage-presenting (cat)girls -- but the tails could go some interesting places pretty quickly (eg, there are some fantastic FFXIV mods that this margin is too narrow to contain). There's a limited extent of that already present on YouTube, since stuff like transformation [cw: no nudity, but you probably don't want it in your YT algorithm], macro, and vore kink can be so far from normal that it's just confusing to the uninitiated, but there's also probably a pretty wide space of simple casual kink that's getting underserved just because it's 'boring' by standard search term meanings.
there is a good summary here as well: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/morgpie-topless-twitch-livestream
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