An AI version of the classic sitcom was funny—until it wasn’t.
Since the hit sitcom Seinfeld went off the air in 1998 after nine seasons, the show’s devoted followers have long mused about an alternate reality: What if the original “show about nothing” had never ended?
Now they’ve gotten what they wished for—well, sort of. In mid-December, a never-ending AI-generated reboot, aptly named Nothing, Forever, launched on the streaming platform Twitch. The characters Jerry Seinfeld, Elaine Benes, George Costanza, and Cosmo Kramer don’t exist here, but you can watch their pixelated, copyright-abiding doppelgängers—Larry Feinberg, Yvonne Torres, Fred Kastopolous, and Zoltan Kakler—shoot the breeze live, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, forever. You could, anyway, until earlier this week, when forever abruptly ended—or was at least briefly interrupted, and in just about the most fitting way imaginable: by the AI scriptwriter devolving into bigotry.
Nothing, Forever is powered by Davinci, the newest publicly available version of OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model—a close relative of ChatGPT—and although that technology is impressive, the show, in most respects, is not. Larry Feinberg’s apartment looks very much like Jerry Seinfeld’s, though the layout and color scheme are wont to shift inexplicably from scene to scene. The characters, for reasons unknown, usually stand with their back to the viewer or to one another, or to both. The graphics are bad—like, ’90s-era PC-game bad—but that’s part of the charm: Not infrequently, characters will end up inside a couch or desk or chair. They walk as though their legs are made of cheese sticks.
The laugh track plays seemingly at random, with no discernible correlation to the funniness of the preceding lines. Example: “Hey, Yvonne,” Larry says. “Did you hear about that new restaurant around the corner?” Hahahahaha. Hilarious. The overall effect is deeply unsettling, like a bizarro animated adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. The show lies in a sort of uncanny valley—recognizably Seinfeld and yet distinctly not.
Traditionally, Seinfeld opened with a bit from the fictional Jerry’s stand-up routine, and although Nothing, Forever can’t really be said to open with anything (seeing as it is, after all, an infinite loop and as such not really even divisible into episodes), it does intersperse material from Larry’s act in much the same way. The difference is that these stand-up sequences are, with few exceptions, deeply unfunny. Sometimes they’re so unfunny that their unfunniness becomes funny. Setups go without punch lines. Utter nonsense is met with riotous laughter. Larry always wears the same blank, vaguely demonic expression; his eyes appear stapled open. The show’s specifics change, but the gist does not.
0 Comments