Culture

That Endless AI-Generated Seinfeld Project Has Been Banned From Twitch

Essentially an A.I. version of Michael Richards' set at the Laugh Bucket.

by Charles Rushforth  7 February 2023
An animated Jerry Seinfeld delievers a stand up comedy set/

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

Hoo boy, ready for a sentence that really distils the world we live in today?

Just days after an endless computer-generated episode of Seinfeld went live on Twitch, the project received a 15-day ban due to a transphobic rant made by the AI simulacrum of Jerry Seinfeld.

Related
Chatbots Are Changing The Landscape Of Pornography As We Know It

Forget Seinfeld 2000, the Instagram account dedicated to retrofitting the ’90s sitcom to the modern day; AI technology briefly gave us entirely new episodes of the show on the streaming platform Twitch.

Nothing, Forever uses chatbot technology OpenAI to generate scripts for the characters while an AI “director” cycles through different camera angles and scenes, resulting in an endless episode of Seinfeld that resembles an existential purgatory.

Until very recently, you could drop into the project’s official streaming channel anytime to watch digital approximations of the original cast stumble around a faithful recreation of Jerry’s apartment, mumbling inane non-sequiturs accompanied by an enthusiastic laugh track. But then something went horribly, horribly wrong.

Seemingly emulating Michael Richards’ own infamous tirade at the Laugh Bucket, the AI went rogue yesterday and made a series of transphobic and homophobic jokes.

Offering a technical explanation for the error on the official discord channel, moderators explained that a chatbot vital to generating the endless television show started playing up, leading admins to downgrade to a more stable but “less sophisticated model” in an attempt to keep the show online. Unfortunately, OpenAI’s content moderation service didn’t work after the transition, briefly turning Jerry into Dave Chappelle.

The good news is that the team reckon they’ve figured out how to fix the problem before they go live again, and are “investigating secondary content moderation systems” in case the main one goes down again. Which means that soon, the only thing viewers will have to worry about is whether the TV show is slowly becoming self-aware.