nothing, foreveran AI-powered engine Seinfeld parody show on Twitch, was quickly becoming the next big thing on the platform. During the permanent broadcast, a cast of Seinfeld-Adjacent characters had puzzling conversations, cracked weird jokes, and moved through a world of rough, blocky graphics, all backed by a laugh track and driven by AI.
But then it was put on hold for two weeks after the Jerry Seinfeld-esque character made transphobic comments. That ban will be lifted on Monday, and while its creators at Mismatch Media have been working to make sure transphobic comments don’t happen again, they can’t guarantee it.
The transphobic comments occurred after Mismatch changed the AI models that underpin the stream. “We started having an outage using the OpenAI GPT-3 Davinci model, which caused the program to exhibit errant behaviors,” according to an announcement in the nothing, forever Discord. “OpenAI has a less sophisticated model, Curie, which was the predecessor of Davinci. When Davinci started to crash, we switched to Curie to try to keep the show running without downtime. The switch to Curie was what resulted in the generation of inappropriate text.”
In a subsequent post, Mismatch added that it “wrongly believed we were leveraging OpenAI’s content moderation system for its text generation models” and that it would be working to implement the OpenAI content moderation API before the program returned. to work.
“Of course, with software, there is always variability”
Since then, Mismatch has been running stability tests against that implementation and making sure there are no false negatives, Mismatch co-founder Skyler Hartle said in an interview with the edge. “So far, it looks great,” she said. But then she evaded it, saying “of course, with software, there’s always variability.” I asked Hartle how Mismatch makes sure the railings work. “I think that in the generative AI space and generative media, there is inherent uncertainty.”
He referenced a lot of the wild things that people have already been able to do that ChatGPT and the new Bing AI chatbot say: “I think everyone in this space needs to be concerned and think about this.” Mismatch Media is addressing this by creating an AI “security council hack team,” Hartle said, which is trying to figure out mitigation strategies so that AI security measures can evolve alongside generative pieces of AI. “We strongly believe that it is our duty as people in the generative space to do this in the safest way possible.”
In addition to leveraging the official OpenAI content moderation API, Mismatch also wants to use OpenAI to assist in the moderation process. “We’re working on creating railings that actually take advantage of OpenAI to pass our content to them and ask them a series of questions and prompts,” Hartle said. Mismatch is “figuring out the right ways to have OpenAI and these great language models help moderate this process. These models are the best for natural language analysis at the moment, so it makes a lot of sense to try using them as a secondary system as well.”
Hartle does not wait for the tone of nothing, forever to change with additional content moderation systems. That probably means we’ll continue to see the show keep creating weirder and more irreverent moments, but hopefully this time around, there’s no transphobia.
Hartle wants to introduce an audience interaction system
Hartle also said that Mismatch wants to introduce an audience interaction system that it had previously created but decided not to launch with. nothing, forever. The system “allows fans to safely interact with the show and potentially massage the direction the show is heading in while retaining its generative spirit,” according to Hartle. Mismatch hopes to launch the system in conjunction with the lifting of Twitch’s ban, but doesn’t “want to promise anything at this point.”
Personally, I’m skeptical of an audience engagement tool in an app like this. While it could be used in a big moment of internet unity like the heyday of TwitchPlaysPokemon, I’m worried it could turn into something like the Tay fiasco.
Beyond nothing, forever, Mismatch Media wants to create a platform for creators to make their own shows. “There’s a lot that goes into that, and a lot that we’re figuring out and iterating, but the plan is to empower, like the next generation of people to do these kinds of things,” Hartle said. The goal is to get this platform up and running in the next six to 12 months.
I also asked Hartle something I’ve been wondering since I first watched the show: Is the plan really to make it work forever? “Our hope is to run the program for as long as we can, as long as it makes economic sense to do it because it’s so expensive,” Hartle said. “But with that being said, we are building this as a technology platform. And we want to do more of the shows. If we succeed at that and are able to build a business around ourselves, I don’t see any reason why nothing, forever It shouldn’t last as long as the fans and the community want it to work.”
