What’s the deal with the AI-generated Seinfeld parody “Nothing, Forever?”
On Sunday night, “Nothing, Forever” found itself in hot water after its AI-generated dialogue included a rant about trans people while streaming on Twitch. The show mimics the hit 90s sitcom, Seinfeld, and follows Larry Feinberg, a robotic 3-D animated stand-in for Jerry Seinfeld, and his three pals have all sorts of zany discussions about, well, nothing. Much of “Nothing, Forever” occurs in Larry’s living room but, like Seinfeld, the show includes a stand-up set opener from our main character.
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“There’s like 50 people here and no one is laughing,” Larry said during the stream. “Anyone have any suggestions?”
Larry then dropped some transphobic lines that likely run afoul of Twitch’s guidelines, resulting in a temporary two-week suspension.
Since Dec. 14 of last year, a computer-generated, 3-D animated parody of Seinfeld has been airing around the clock on Twitch. The dialogue is completely generated by OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model. (If OpenAI sounds familiar, that’s because they are behind the popular ChatGPT AI chatbot as well.) The media group behind the project, Mismatch Media, included a few moderation filters when setting “Nothing, Forever” up, but beyond that, they’ve been hands-off and letting the AI take the show wherever it may go.
But, something clearly went wrong on Sunday.
The creators of “Nothing, Forever” explained in the show’s Discord chat that they were changing AI models when the moderation failure occurred, leading to Larry’s rant about trans people. Another person on the team also stressed that the resulting content in no way reflected what the show’s creators believe.
Twitch has suspended the channel for two weeks. After that time, it appears “Nothing, Forever” will be back and Larry will have better stand-up material.
