Nothing, Forever: the rise and fall of the first AI-generated sitcom

If you’ve been anywhere near the internet in the last week, you’ve probably already seen some uncanny scenes from Nothing, Forever, the AI-generated Seinfeld clone that’s been running non-stop on Twitch to around 15,000 consistent viewers. At least, it was running on Twitch, until the platform banned it earlier this week for a transphobic standup routine.

In case you haven’t been keeping up with the latest developments in AI’s takeover of the creative industries, Nothing, Forever was basically an animated version of the iconic 90s sitcom, where almost everything – down to the script, voices, and ‘direction’ – was driven by various AI systems, such as OpenAI’s GPT-3. As in the original, the cast of four archetypal characters including Larry Feinberg, a pixellated digital stand-in for Jerry Seinfeld himself, spent most of their time hanging out in an apartment, discussing new shoes, bagel spots, and... existential musings on the nature of their own existence.

The difference between Nothing, Forever and Seinfeld is that, true to its name, Nothing, Forever never stopped (until it did). The endless churn of content continued 24 hours a day, transitioning between virtual sit-com sets and the comedy club where Larry does standup, and back again, ad infinitum, all rendered with the immaculate graphical fidelity of an early PS1 game. 

Infinity comes at a cost, of course, and the show was definitely a case of quantity over quality. Characters’ movements were eerie at best and glitchy at worst, and now and again they would drift through walls like ghosts. Then, there was the fact that almost 100 per cent of their jokes failed to land – either they were completely nonsensical, or their punchlines were cut off by an over-eager roar of canned laughter. Which brings us to the comedy set that got Larry Feinberg kicked off the air (at least temporarily).

“So, this is my standup set in a club,” says Larry in the offending clip. “There’s like 50 people here, and no one is laughing. Anyone have any suggestions? I’m thinking about doing a bit 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. But no one is laughing.”

Honestly? That sounds more like a modern standup bit than anything else the Nothing, Forever AI has come up with, and – judging by this year’s Grammys – transphobia is a surefire route to comedy success. Twitch disagreed, however, and as of February 6 the show was banned on its platform for at least two weeks, for violating community guidelines.

“Hey everybody. Here’s the latest: we received a 14-day suspension due to what Larry Feinberg said tonight during a club bit,” one of the show’s creators told fans on Discord. “We’ve appealed the ban, and we’ll let you know as we know more on what Twitch decides. Regardless of the outcome of the appeal, we’ll be back and will spend the time working to ensure to the best of our abilities that nothing like that happens again.”

The creators also went into some detail about how the transphobic comments and homophobic conspiracy theory were allowed to slip through the cracks, saying that an outage related to GPT-3’s DaVinci model (the most capable of OpenAI’s language generators) caused them to switch to a faster and cheaper model named Curie, which led to generating the inappropriate text.

“We are super embarrassed, and the generative content created in no way reflects the values or opinions of our staff,” co-creator Skyler Hartle tells the Guardian in a recent interview, adding that extra safeguards will be put in place before Nothing, Forever gets back on air.

The added scrutiny caused by the controversy has brought to light other, unrelated information that’s disappointing some viewers, however – namely, that Nothing, Forever is actually the product of aspirational tech bros, rather than a satirical send-up of AI’s inability to construct a proper joke. 

This is, unfortunately, the case. “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,” Hartle tells Vice, adding that the team behind Nothing, Forever aim to get in on the ground floor. “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... That’s truly where we see the future emerging towards.”

Thankfully, the haunting failure that is Nothing, Forever seems to prove that human showrunners don’t have much to fear just yet (unless Netflix is exclusively searching for sit-coms set in a Lynchian hellscape... which sounds pretty appealing tbh). With Netflix increasingly leaning on AI to create content, though, it might not be too long before we can drop into a virtual film set for 24/7 entertainment, and folks, it’s not looking promising.

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