An A.I.-generated never-ending episode of “Seinfeld” titled “Nothing, Forever” has been broadcasting on an infinite stream on Twitch since mid-December and has suddenly drawn a lot of attention this week thanks to an article in Vice.
Co-creator Skyler Hartle tells the outlet the show was created as a parody of Seinfeld and began life as: “a weird, very, off-center kind of nonsensical, surreal art project. But then we kind of worked over the years to bring it to this new place.”
Hartle and his co-creator, Brian Habersberger, used a combination of machine learning, generative algorithms, and cloud services to build the series which is dubbed a “continuously evolving exploration into procedurally generated entertainment”.
With dialogue powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model, there is very little human moderation of the stream beyond some built-in moderation filters. Dialogue, speech, direction, character movement, and music are all generative.
The result is crudely animated versions of the main cast talking like robots in pixel art surroundings like out of very early 1990s video games. There are establishing shots of a New York City brownstone facade, laugh track at certain moments, a channel guide that pops up after a few scenes, and cuts to the Jerry-inspired character named Larry Feinberg doing a standup segment where he speaks into a microphone.
At one point in the stream this week, Larry’s standup was pure silence for at least ten minutes. Hartle says as generative A.I. and generative media gets better, the implications of this kind of thing are clear:
“We have this notion that at any point, you’re gonna be able to turn on the future equivalent of Netflix and watch a show perpetually, nonstop as much as you want.
You don’t just have seven seasons of a show, you have seven hundred, or infinite seasons of a show that has fresh content whenever you want it. And so that became one of our grounding pillars.
Our grounding principle was, can we create a show that can generate entertaining content forever? Because that’s truly where we see the future emerging towards. Our goal with the next iterations or next shows that we release is to actually trade a show that is like Netflix-level quality.”
Hartle adds that, unlike most television shows, an A.I. generated show like “Nothing, Forever” is able to almost immediately change its narrative based on people’s feedback that is received through the Twitch stream chat.
You can watch the series for yourself over at Twitch.tv/watchmeforever.
