What’s wrong with the AI-generated product Seinfeld parody “Nothing, forever?”
Sunday night, “Nothing, Forever” found itself in hot water after its AI-generated dialogue included a diatribe(Opens in a new tab) about trans people streaming on Twitch. The show mimics the hit 90s sitcom, Seinfeld, and follows Larry Feinberg, a 3D-animated robotic stand-in for Jerry Seinfeld, and his three pals have all sorts of goofy discussions about, well, nothing. Much of “Nothing, Forever” happens in Larry’s living room but, like Seinfeldthe show includes a standing first set of our main character.
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“There’s about 50 people here and nobody’s laughing,” Larry said during the stream. “Anyone have any suggestions?”
Larry then dropped some transphobic lines that likely go against Twitch’s guidelines, resulting in a two-week temporary suspension.
Since December 14 of last year, a computer-generated 3D animated parody of Seinfeld has been diffused 24 hours a day on Twitch. The dialog is entirely generated by OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model. (If OpenAI sounds familiar, that’s because they’re also behind the popular ChatGPT AI chatbot.) The media group behind the project, Mismatch Media, included a few moderation filters when setting up ” Nothing, Forever,” but beyond that, they’ve been indifferent and let the AI take the show wherever it goes.
But, something clearly went wrong on Sunday.
The creators of “Nothing, Forever” explained in the show’s Discord chat that they were changing the AI models when the moderation failure happened, which led to Larry’s rant about the trans people. Another person on the team also pointed out that the resulting content in no way reflects what the creators of the show believe.
Twitch suspended the channel for two weeks. After that time, it looks like “Nothing, Forever” will be back and Larry will have better stand-up material.
