The last we saw of Seinfeld was in 1998 but it has been kept alive through references in movies and TV shows. For the last many weeks, people around the world were watching Nothing, Forever, an AI-generated version of Seinfeld that streams perpetually on Twitch…. until the plug was temporarily pulled a couple of weeks ago when a character made transphobic remarks. The suspension is coming to an end and the show’s creators, Mismatch Media, have been working on ways to ensure transphobic comments don’t pop up again.
In case you haven’t seen the AI-generated show, Nothing, Forever is endless, like the name suggests. Streaming on Twitch since mid-December, it tells the “story” of four characters — Larry, Fred, Yvonne and Kakler, who happen to look like Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer had they been drawn into a 1990s computer game. All they can do is talk about nothing, things that appear trivial but never out of place.
It’s the brainchild of Skyler Hartle, a senior project manager at Microsoft, and Brian Habersberger, a photovoltaic encapsulant materials scientist at Dow Chemical. Their art project uses artificial intelligence programme GPT-3, the responsive textgenerating programme that powers the viral AI tool ChatGPT.
“Nothing, Forever is a show about nothing, that happens forever. Kinda like popular sitcoms of the past, except that it never stops.... Everything you see, hear, or experience (with the exception of the artwork and laugh track) is always brand new content, generated via machine learning and AI algorithms,” read an earlier note on the site.
Two weeks ago, the artificial comedian made a few transphobic comments in a stand-up routine and shortly afterwards, Twitch suspended the channel for 14 days for violating the platform’s community guidelines.
It seems that the show is returning. Mismatch co-founder Skyler Hartle has told The Verge: “So far, it looks really good, of course, with software, there’s always variability…. I think that in the space of generative AI and generative media, there is an inherent uncertainty.” He has also said: “We are working to create guardrails that actually leverage OpenAI to pass our content to them and ask a series of questions and prompts.
Before the show was suspended, I have been watching it now and then and, frankly, the show has its moments and it pointed to a dystopian experience that may become commonplace in the future. Someone like Jerry Seinfeld may not approve of the show because it feels like a robot has created it but full marks to the creators of the show. At the same time, the show highlights that technology needs moderation.