AI Is Streaming An Endlessly Generated Seinfeld TV Show On Twitch And Yes It's Bizarre
To be clear, when we say "everything" is AI-generated, that technically doesn't apply to the 3D assets or a few of the sound effects, like the laugh tracks. However, the placement of those effects, as well as the camera angles, camera cuts, character poses and movements, the dialogue, the "music," and even the characters' voices are indeed all created completely by generative AI.
While the characters and their voices aren't recognizably related to Seinfeld—likely for copyright reasons—the resemblance is enough to be immediately familiar. "Larry Feinberg," "Fred Kastopolous," Zoltan Kakler,," and "Yvonne Torres" are having mundane conversations with a laugh track, set in an early-PC-game approximation of a New York City brownstone apartment.
Sections of Nothing, Forever inside the apartment are set apart from one another by segments with Larry telling "jokes" to an assumed audience as part of a stand-up routine, by exterior shots of the apartment building, and by a strange AI-generated cable TV "guide" that calls back once again to the early 2000s.
The "show" is the creation of Skyler Hartle and Brian Habersberger of Mismatch Media, who created it as an homage to Seinfeld. Hartle tells Vice Motherboard that it "originally started life as this weird, very off-center kind of nonsensical, surreal art project" and you can certainly see those origins in the finished project. The show is based on the GPT-3 language model, and it's hooked into the stream chat so that viewers can actually interact with the narrative.
Despite being largely nonsense most of the time, Nothing, Forever can be weirdly mesmerizing in its inanity. Spend a few minutes and check it out over on Twitch.
