The AI Seinfeld show ‘Nothing, Forever’ is back on Twitch

Nothing, Forever, an AI-generated livestream inspired by Seinfeld is back on Twitch after being taken offline for an anti-LGBTQ outburst, Gizmodo has reported. After launching in December, the show (from Mismatch Media) became internet-famous for its Seinfeld-adjacent plots, janky ’90s-era video game style animation and terrible (though coherent) dialogue. However, it was pulled over a month ago after violating Twitch’s conduct policy banning hate speech around sexual and gender identity.

In the most notorious incident, the AI lead character (“Larry”), went on an offensive rant. “I’m thinking about doing a bit about how being transgender is actually a mental illness. Or how all liberals are secretly gay and want to impose their will on everyone. Or something about how transgender people are ruining the fabric of society. But no one is laughing, so I’m going to stop.”

Shortly afterwards, Mismatch Media cofounder Skyler Hartle explained that the problem started when its OpenAI GPT-3 Davinci model stopped working correctly. The team switched to Davinci’s predecessor Curie, believing that OpenAI’s content moderation was still active — which was apparently not the case. The offensive outbursts started shortly afterwards.

“We mistakenly believed that we were leveraging OpenAI’s content moderation system for their text generation models. We are working now to implement OpenAI’s content moderation API (it’s a tool we can use to verify the safeness of the content) before we go live again, and investigating secondary content moderation systems as redundancies,” the team said. 

Problems of moderation and offensive content have plagued AI chatbots since they arrived. Microsoft has experienced it twice, first with its Tay chatbot that turned racist, and later with the Bing Chat search assistant powered by OpenAI tech. The latter was pulled for a time after it started insulting users and outputting incorrect information, while insisting it was right. 

Nothing, Forever seems to be working as before, with the same laugh track, engaged viewers (around 3,500 currently) and complete disregard for collision detection — but no offensive outbursts so far. While nothing in the show makes any sense, the fact that AI can generate all the elements in real time is impressive.