Over at Forbes, Vice and BoingBoing we are told that there’s an endless AI-generated Seinfeld episode running on Twitch. This has been going on for a month under the title Nothing, Forever. Although it sounds like something Alex and his droogs might be forced to watch in A Clockwork Orange, the site has been recorded as having up to 6,000 voluntary viewers at a time on its chat channel, which also provides feedback to the algorithm.
Nothing, Forever is powered by OpenAI, including the dialogue, speech, camera shots, character movement, and music. The end result is what would happen if you trapped the characters from Seinfeld in a computer algorithm and set them loose in a never-ending episode of surreal nonsense. Vague, algorithmically generated versions of Jerry, Kramer, Elaine, and George float aimlessly around their apartment, engaging in dream-like conversations that are only loosely connected to reality. We cut back and forth from there to an AI-generated Jerry telling AI-generated jokes at a comedy club. The result is a work that may be the 21st century’s answer to Waiting for Godot.
Is this the future of entertainment? A future in which we view an endless stream of dreamlike, nonsensical conversations, powered by OpenAI and more suited to David Lynch? Co-creator Skyler Hartle says, “The actual impetus for this was it originally started its life as this weird, very, off-center kind of nonsensical, surreal art project.” But then AI got into the picture.
Yes, there is a laugh track, and it is AI-generated, It may have you wondering if Jerry’s apartment is adjacent to a haunted carnival.
Update:
Benj Edwards tells us in Endless Seinfeld episode grinds to a halt after AI comic violates Twitch guidelines that Nothing, Forever is cancelled for fourteen days. The ban is due to inappropriate content generated by OpenAI’s lower-cost text-curie-001 model, which was switched in to the system when OpenAI’s more sophisticated text-davinci-003 model went out of service. The creators. of course, say that that the content was accidental and are appealing the ban.
Here’s the video:
