What is 'Nothing Forever,' a new internet sensation, and why was it suspended from Twitch?

WASHINGTON (TND) — “You know what else is hilarious? The fact that you’re still trying to figure out if it’s a joke or not.”

That line from the streaming sitcom “Nothing Forever,” is a perfect encapsulation of its whole point. Although, streaming sitcom is admittedly a bit of a misnomer. “Nothing Forever” is a procedurally generated sitcom that both spoofs and pays homage to the great sitcom about nothing, “Seinfeld,” as well as David Lynch’s “Rabbits.”

What’s a procedurally generated sitcom? One where everything – from the backgrounds and the music to the character models, staging, script and voice overs are created by AI programs. The dialogue is generated by speech program GPT-3, specifically, while Stable Diffusion, DALL-E and Azure Cognitive Services are some of the other main technologies involved.

The show – which normally streams 24/7 on Twitch as content is constantly churned out by the AI running it – landed in hot water and got slapped with a 14 day ban from Twitch Monday. While officials from the platform, which is owned and run by Amazon, but many speculate it is related to an attempted joke that was generated as a part of the character Larry (the corollary to Jerry in “Seinfeld”) doing a stand-up comedy set within show.

In the allegedly focal bit of dialogue, Larry begins by saying “So, this is my standup set in a club. There’s like 50 people here and no one is laughing. Any suggestions?” He follows up by saying, “I’m thinking 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.”

The sudden, off-brand and crude remarks were believed to be caused when the operators and creators of “Nothing Forever,” a collective called Mismatch Media, replaced the speech model program used in GPT-3. The primary model, called Davinci, experienced outages throughout the show and was replaced with Curie, whose speech models were unregulated and was smaller in comparison.

In the show’s official channel on Discord, a social media platform originally developed by video game players to make chat rooms and facilitate audio and video calls, one of the staffers posted in response to the news, “None of what was said reflects the devs’ (or anyone else on the staff team’s) opinions.”

As AI rises in use and popularity, many of its creators – especially in the realm of speech generation like GPT-3 – also develop tools to mitigate potentially inflammatory content like what “Larry” said during the stream.

While conservatives on social media were quick to jump to snark about cancel culture, the incident did not cause the kind of digital flare we are accustomed to during such sensitive incidents of speech.

Up until its suspension, “Nothing Forever” had been steadily growing its audience. By Thursday morning, the channel had 11,000 active viewers and around 47,000 followers. It has also been praised for its surrealism and humor by critics and by viewers who also can’t quite seem to understand their attraction to the show.

That new AI-generated Seinfeld channel on Twitch is pulling me in way more than anything on Netflix does,” tweeted user @rudeism. “I think my brain might actually be rotted and I can't stop watching it.

“There’s another bit where “Elaine” talks about how the city’s passing an ordinance against jaywalking and how she’ll never get anywhere in the city anymore,” wrote a critic for The Verge. “I don’t understand why, but I laughed along with the laugh track.”

Mismatch Media appealed the ban and is waiting to hear back.