A professional chef on Twitch is always facing humorous denials from viewers in their homes that his cooking shows are all pre-recorded.

Real and fake are getting harder to tell apart in the era of startlingly realistic AI, where entire personalities may be duplicated by lines of code. When it comes to entertainment that is live-streamed on Twitch, that is even more true. Numerous viewers have been left in the dark by recent developments, including the emergence of false copies of streamers and AI-generated TV shows. Now that fans have started to delightfully punch holes in all of his streams, chef Henry from Henry’s Kitchen is bearing the brunt of this consequences. 

Hundreds of viewers who joined in on recent broadcasts of his relaxing cooking sessions on Twitch have accumulated a mountain of complaints that his cooking shows aren’t entirely trustworthy. Henry virtually always utilizes a distinct green-screen background in his broadcasts, feeding into this burgeoning hypothesis. Even the fans’ own kitchens can be submitted for him to stream in front of. One purportedly actual camera shot, of his cat named “Roast Beef,” balances out this false scene. However, not everyone believes his pet cat, as seen on Twitch, really does exist. 

Henry jokingly said, “There is an internet theory going around and I almost don’t want to dignify it by responding. That roast beef is a hoax. That somehow roast beef passed away months ago and I’ve just been using pre-recorded footage to cut to.”

Henry entered the other room and displayed his hand in front of the cat camera in an effort to definitively refute the “haters.”

He added; “I hope that puts to rest any suspicions I’m using pre-recorded footage.”

Sadly, it wasn’t enough to finish the task. Everyone kept making jokes that it was all a ruse as the accusations mounted. No matter what he said in response, viewers could never be sure he was talking to them live and in the moment. He read out of the Twitch conversation, “I don’t think we can trust anything we see on this stream.”

In a last-ditch effort, Henry amusingly strolled off camera holding a recipe with the apparent intention of showing the date on the sheet of paper, but he neglected to switch to the cat camera. “Now that’s gotta prove it. How would I have known I was gonna be making Chakchouka, which I had never even heard of, but also I would’ve had to Photoshop the date February 8, 2023, which would have required a lot of anticipation.”

In the end, the running joke endures because the cooking streamer plays it all up and subtly supports the hypothesis.