About a week ago a story about a 24/7 twitch stream caught my attention. The stream was described by its creators as a “nonsensical surreal art project”. The project was to stream a non-stop AI generated show inspired by the beloved 90s sitcom about nothing. ‘Nothing Forever’ began streaming in mid-December, featuring scripts and visuals all generated by AI.
When I heard about it I knew that I had to check it out, I opened twitch and sure enough it was featured as recommended on the homepage. I sat down and watched about 10 minutes. I think that the creators were extremely accurate in their description of the project as nonsensical and surreal. The jokes that were recognizable as jokes weren’t funny, and most of the time I couldn’t tell if something was meant to be a joke until the laugh track kicked in. Still, I don’t feel as though I wasted 10 minutes, it was truly fascinating to watch this early step in AI generation.
This project offered exactly what it promised, broadcasting surreal AI generated content around the clock, from mid-December until this weekend when it was served a ban for violating twitch’s terms of service.
The violation came late Sunday night, when the Jerry Seinfeld character “Larry Feinberg” went on a transphobic rant during his stand up bit. Following that up with the statement that “all liberals are secretly gay and want to impose their will on everyone”. He finished his bit with the seemingly self aware statement “no one is laughing, so I’m going to stop,”.
Twitch served ‘Nothing Forever’ a two-week ban for violating community guidelines. After this ban the project leaders explained what went wrong. According to them a technical glitch forced them to switch from the advanced GPT-3 Davinci model that had been running the show to a previous version called Curie. Shortly after the switch, Curie generated the offensive content.
The team seems confident that they have learned from their mistake, and that the issues will not resurface. They are currently disputing the length of the ban. Whether this dispute is successful or not the project should be back streaming on twitch sometime soon if you are interested in checking it out.
If you are interested in reading more about the project or this incident you can check out these links:
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/feb/04/ai-seinfeld-nothing-forever-twitch
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/02/07/ai-seinfeld-transphobic-gpt3/