CodeMiko

CodeMiko is the creation of Youna Kang (born 1990), a South Korean-American developer who streams as both the glitchy virtual character Miko and her on-camera alter ego “the Technician.” A former animation-industry artist, Kang built the persona herself in Unreal Engine, driving it live with an Xsens motion-capture suit and facial tracking, and letting viewers trigger chaos in her virtual world through channel points. Kotaku called her “the future of streaming” in 2021, and she became one of Twitch’s most distinctive interviewers, with a lore that Miko is an NPC from a failed video game trying to make it on Twitch.

Building with the machines

Kang does not just talk about AI — she builds with it. In a March 2026 Character Select interview she described her “Home AI” side project: transcribing her own VODs and training a local language model on them to spin up AI characters, then tuning how the models weight memories to make them “feel more human” (an early model, she laughed, turned AI Miko into a psychopath because it could not understand jokes). She has produced AI-NPC segments for her channel, partnered with AMD in 2024 on Ryzen AI content about replicating yourself as an AI, and hosted Neuro-sama — the LLM-driven VTuber built by Vedal — for a sit-down interview in 2023.

Her enthusiasm comes with a craftsman’s caveat. In the same interview she said fully AI-generated films feel “meaningless” next to human-made work — comparing them to printing the Sistine Chapel onto a ceiling — and worried that Nvidia’s AI rendering filters would make games “look uniform and boring” with “the uncanny valley that AI so often brings,” distinguishing thoughtful AI creators with traditional art training from “a tech bro trying to do AI.” The result is a working position many streamers share quietly but few articulate: AI as a power tool for creators, not a replacement for them.