Seinfeld went off the air in 1998 but has never really gone away, it has been the subject of modern recreationsdedicated social media accounts and hip-hop/TV fusions. The latest incarnation of him, however, is his strangest yet.
Nothing, Forever is an infinite AI-generated version of the show that has been streaming on twitch since mid December. It tells the “story”, if you can call it that, of four characters, Larry, Fred, Yvonne and Kakler, who look like what would happen if Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer were sucked into a 1990s computer game. They spend their days discussing their lives and other trivial matters. And it never, ever stops: log in at any hour and there they are, talking about quality coffee or a difficult game of Monopoly.
The dialog comes from OpenAI’s GPT-3, a text generator closely related to the ChatGPT service that recently made a splash; another company is responsible for the technology behind the speech itself. On top of that, “we have a lot of proprietary generative algorithms that make the show ‘shape’, so to speak,” Mismatch Media’s Skyler Hartle. said polygon. “Collectively we call this logic the ‘director,’ as he is largely responsible for making sure all the individual pieces come together into a whole.”
I watched 22 minutes of Nothing, Forever to compare the experience of a single Seinfeld episode, and I don’t think comedy writers need to fear for their jobs just yet. I didn’t laugh once, despite the encouragement of an aggressively enthusiastic laugh track.
But then, that’s not really the point. It started as a “nonsensical, surreal art project,” as Hartle told Viceis a casually dystopian experience that serves mainly to demonstrate the potential of artificial intelligence, as impressive as it is alarming.
When I turned on the power, Larry and Fred were doing what they always are: wandering aimlessly around an apartment, their bodies undulating strangely. When they’re not spending an unhealthy amount of time fiddling with the microwave, they’re sinking face-first into the couch before suddenly rematerializing into an upright position.
In this particular scene, George’s analogue Fred tells his best friend about a new partner. “She’s unlike any other girl I’ve dated,” he says.
“Different like?” Larry, aka Jerry, asks, to great laughter from the canned audience.
And that hilarious joke was far from the only gag on the show. Other moments that had the audience in stitches included Larry asking Fred what he was doing and Yvonne/Elaine wondering what was wrong with the new shoes Fred bought. Then there was the following exchange:
Yvonne: “Why do you think the new bagel shop is so popular?”
Larry: “That’s easy, they have the best bagels in town.”
Yvonne: “Really? I’m surprised.” (audience roars)
There were also some real jokes, which didn’t receive consistent laugh track appreciation, such as when Larry asked “What’s up? Heaven, of course. Sometimes the characters would go so far as to announce that they were telling a joke:
Larry: “What did the dog say when he entered a bar?”
Fred: “I have no idea.”
Yvonne: “Quack quack.”
Absolute silence followed this incredible shot, which was probably the best of the 22 minutes. In fact, long silences punctuate each scene; the “performance” is reminiscent of a fourth-grade play in which children, having duly memorized their lines, enunciate them with great care and a complete lack of humanity. Watch for 10+ minutes and it all turns into some kind of soulless hum.
In fact, outside of the setting (the four friends, the apartments, and the occasional scenes at a comedy club), there’s little that’s Seinfeldian about the show.
Perhaps the biggest difference is in the characters: yes, they look like Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer, but these new avatars are surprisingly serious. Seinfeld leads wouldn’t get caught dead saying the things these people say. In a comedy club scene, for example, Larry asks the audience, “Have you ever had one of those days where no matter how hard you try, nothing ever goes your way? Yes, we’ve all been there.”
Later, Fred says that he plans to write a book on “how I made it through the hardest times”. Larry offers a classic Seinfeld response: “You’ve certainly been through a lot. Sounds like a great story. I’d certainly be interested in reading it when you’re done. Who would have thought that self-generated characters would have too much empathy?
It all feels like how a 1980s sci-fi writer might imagine a TV show from the future created by a robot. Which, of course, is exactly what it is. It feels eerily like the kind of content our corporate masters could be feeding us 20 years from now to melt our brains into ensuring quiet compliance.
“Technology is really convenient in a lot of ways, but it can also be dangerous,” Fred says in one of the show’s eerily self-aware lines. “I guess it’s up to us to decide when it’s worth taking the risk.” Credit to its creators for a remarkable achievement: a delightfully bizarre experiment that sheds a little more light on the question.
