Twitch sparked outrage with a holiday emote promotion featuring a poorly rendered cat generated by artificial intelligence.
According to a post in the r/LivestreamFail subreddit, Twitch announced a promotion that ran from Dec. 6 through Dec. 13. Part of that promotion was a new emote that could be used featuring a cat in a Santa hat. Seems harmless enough, right?
If you thought the Holiday Hoopla was over, think again.
— Twitch (@Twitch) December 7, 2024
'Tis the season for coming together like never before because Shared Chat now includes shared viewership. Get combined view count, boosted discoverability, and from Dec 6-13 a festive new emote named (jinglebells… pic.twitter.com/m8YRqY7Ecz
It would be, except that the cat was very clearly an AI generation. With its haunting dead eyes, oddly lit fur, a mouth that featured teeth that seemed to be blending into the skin of its jaw, and the strange fur that only appears in one ear but not the other, it's clear that the massive livestreaming company hastily threw together a poorly made AI version of a cat wearing a Santa hat.
While the use of AI in this situation may seem harmless, consider this: Twitch could very easily have paid a real, actual artist to whip up this image; it's big enough and popular enough that almost any artist would happily handle the project quickly and easily. It's just the latest example of companies using AI to take jobs and opportunities away from real creatives, replacing their work with hollow, artificially generated content in the name of saving a couple of bucks.
Twitch isn't the first company to get in trouble for AI art recently; video game developer Treyarch came under fire for using an AI-generated image in its promotional art for the new season of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Google has come under almost constant fire for its Gemini large language model that has spread across the search engine, thanks to its frequent and comically bad mistakes.
Commenters were quick to call out Twitch for its shameless AI usage.
"Don't they have design people to do this?" one said. "Or did they all get fired too?"
"Considering the massive amount of artists in Twitch, they could have easily found someone to just..commission," said another. "'Cat wearing a Santa hat' can be done by so many people and support a legit creator."
"Any company using AI images or videos just screams tacky to me no matter what they're selling," said a third.
"You'd think with the long history of emote artists being taken advantage of on Twitch this would be something they would actively look to avoid," another noted.
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