An AI-Generated ‘Seinfeld’ Is Streaming on Twitch and It’s Insanely Inane
Artificial intelligence is running with “a show about nothing.” Nothing, Forever, an AI-generated version of the 90s hit Seinfeld has been streaming on Twitch for the last month — laugh track included — and it just goes on and on and on.
Created by Skyler Hartle, a senior product manager at Microsoft, and Brian Habersberger, a senior research scientist at Dow, the AI-generated sitcom launched on December 14 as the first project of Mismatch Media. It’s a never-ending episode where algorithmically animated likenesses of Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer amble about what looks like a present-day version of Jerry’s apartment, aimlessly.
The show was created at first as “this weird, very, off-center kind of nonsensical, surreal art project,” Hartle said in an interview with Vice. “But then we kind of worked over the years to bring it to this new place. And then, of course, generative media and generative AI just kind of took off in a crazy way over the past couple of years.”
In it, the characters engage in OpenAI’s GPT-3-powered dialogue — conversations that could only be best described as surreal, almost Lynchian, and endless. They talk about present-day topics like veganism, phone chargers, and celebrity scandals, and a lot about making plans like going to the movies or checking out a new cafe, or a place that gives out free socks, but they never leave the apartment, apart from vignettes of the Jerry character (or Larry, in this version) doing standup.
At some point, a viewer caught, they even seemed to have started becoming self-aware.
“The show can effectively change and the narrative actually evolves based on the audience,” Hartle said. “One of the major factors that we’re thinking about is how do we get people involved in crafting the narrative so it becomes their own.”
Apart from OpenAI’s GPT-3 large language model, the creators used Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Azure Cognitive Services to build the show. The dialogue and the scenes are all pretty much driven by GPT-3, and according to Hartle, it has very little human moderation.
“Aside from the artwork and the laugh track you’ll hear, everything else is generative, including: dialogue, speech, direction (camera cuts, character focus, shot length, scene length, etc), character movement, and music,” the creators wrote on Reddit.
At this point, the show is a marvel only in the sense that it exists. There’s nothing yet in the content that would make showrunners sweat about losing their jobs. But Hartle and Habersberger plan to change that in the future.
“As generative media gets better, 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,” Hartle said.
“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.”
Viewers will just have to wait and see.
Information for this briefing was found via Vice, Forbes, Indiewire, and the sources and companies mentioned. The author has no securities or affiliations related to the organizations discussed. Not a recommendation to buy or sell. Always do additional research and consult a professional before purchasing a security. The author holds no licenses.
