Test Your Stamina With This AI-Powered Endless Seinfeld Show
You can watch all nine seasons of Seinfeld as many times as you want, but you will never see another new episode again. That is, until you tune in to Nothing, Forever, an endless AI parody of the popular sitcom that just might melt your brain.
I am not kidding. On Twitch, you can now watch an artificial intelligence parody of Seinfeld that runs 24/7. Like Seinfeld , it features four friends – Larry Feinberg (Jerry), Fred Castopoulos (George), Yvonne Torres (Elaine), and Zoltan Kalker (Kramer) – who are always hanging out and chatting, but this one is almost Dadaist. its possibly inadvertent attempts to be a show about nothing . The show uses the GPT-3 OpenAI model , Davinci, to write its scripts, and according to TechCrunch , the Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services speech API to enhance the characters’ voices. All the blocky visuals that make up the pixelated world of Nothing Forever are created using the Unity game engine.
Your first impression may be that the show is impressive. It’s entirely AI-generated and never stops, with various scenes, scenarios, and (mostly) accurate cuts of the speaking characters. But after a while, you will start to notice some oddities and repetitions. Many scenes start the same way: “Hey, did you hear the news?” or “Have you heard about the opening of a new restaurant down the street?” Oh my god , they love to talk about restaurants.
This is another quirk. The characters always talk about going somewhere, but they never do. There are only four locations: Larry’s apartment, Yvonne’s apartment, Fred’s apartment, and Larry’s comedy club, the last of which is the only time we see Larry “get out”. His jokes range from the overused and trite (we’re talking at the level of “Why did the chicken cross the road?”) to the downright bizarre:
So I was in the store and the man in front of me was trying to pick out a present for his wife. He was struggling, so I said, “Just pick something that says you love her.” He says: “You are right. I guess that’s what the roses say. I say, “No, give her a shovel.” He looks at me, a little puzzled. I say, “So she can dig her own grave if you make a mistake.”
Sometimes characters say they will leave, but they don’t. Larry says he’s going to leave and Fred says come back soon! But Larry sits motionless on the couch. Scenes also often end abruptly, with characters sitting in silence until they move on to the next AI-generated scene. Sometimes Larry jokes, but he never goes through with it. In most cases, the scenes are interrupted when the characters move around the set in a strange way. Sometimes Larry directs everything he says to the fridge and not to his friends.
It’s a strange experience, and watching too long can melt your brain. The collective brains of Twitch chat participants seem to have melted as they lose their minds whenever anything happens (even though nothing ever really happens) . When a Sim discusses a new restaurant that has just opened in town, the chat will spam NEW RESTAURANT over and over again. It’s not unlike the Rocky Horror Picture show (minus the general atmosphere of being in the same room as the rest of the audience) and perhaps more entertaining than the show itself. There’s even Discord for Nothing, Forever fans to chat about the series, and the lore has been evolving so far.
The most frightening moments are when the characters seem… self-aware. Larry’s stand-up once included reflections on how he couldn’t tell if his stories were just stories or if they actually happened. Then, in between discussions about restaurants they would never actually go to, there are deep conversations like:
Never mind, Forever might interest you briefly and then send you away after hearing the 15th “news” story. But for others, it can be hypnotizing. I don’t want to look away because every once in a while, among empty talk about restaurants they’ll never actually go to or terrible jokes told on stage, there’s a nugget of pure gold – maybe something really funny, maybe something deep. , or maybe something a little unsettling, something that reminds us that AI is coming for all of us.
Also disturbing: while the performance has been quite entertaining so far, the show’s creators believe it’s the spark of a new kind of entertainment. In an interview with Vice, co-creator Skyler Hartle said:
As generative media gets better, we have the idea that at any time you can turn on the future equivalent of Netflix and watch the show continuously, without interruption, for as long as you want. You don’t just have seven seasons of the show, you have seven hundred or an infinite number of seasons of the show that has fresh content when you want it. And that became one of our guiding principles… Our guiding principle was, can we create a show that can generate entertainment content forever? Because this is really what we see the future towards. Our goal with the next iterations, or the next shows we release, is to actually sell a show that is similar in quality to Netflix.
It’s a stretch (also: rudeness). I don’t think many of us want our TV shows to be like Nothing, Forever . The show works because it’s new, not because it’s really good. If there were more such programs available to watch at any time, even if the overall quality were better, the attraction would instantly disappear – your local streaming service’s hard drives are already full of almost unwatchable shows and movies. Right now, Nothing Forever is only gaining popularity through discourse. The combination of ridiculous things said by AI and reactions in chat makes it a unique form of internet entertainment. Transfer it to Netflix or HBO Max and suddenly you lose me – and maybe everyone else.
[ TechCrunch ]