Last week, we reported on Nothing Forever, an infinite AI-generated comedy show that uses Seinfeld iconography as its foundation. It had been streaming on Twitch 24/7, garnering more and more concurrent viewers to the amusement of all. And now, this joyful AI story has reached its natural, hate-filled conclusion: Twitch has banned Nothing Forever for 14 days for a transphobic standup routine told by the Larry (aka Jerry Seinfeld) character (per Vice).
Apparently, Larry stated the following, fueled by AI: “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, so I’m going to stop. Thanks for coming out tonight. See you next time. Where’d everybody go?”
Now, perhaps one could read the above and view it in an ironic context, where Larry is mocking people who would attempt such jokes. The problem with that is we’re talking about an AI, as opposed to a human being with conscious intentions, and in situations like these, AI basically always gets worse instead of better. The fact that Nothing Forever got banned from Twitch is probably for its own good as a product, as far as pushing the developers to improve the AI and ensure the Seinfeld shenanigans get back on track.
For their part, the creators of Nothing Forever explained what happened on Discord. Staffer “tinylobsta” offered the following technical explanation for why Nothing Forever suddenly made a brief turn for the transphobic:
We’ve been investigating the root cause of the issue. Earlier tonight, we started having an outage using OpenAI’s GPT-3 Davinci model, which caused the show to exhibit errant behaviors (you may have seen empty rooms cycling through). OpenAI has a less sophisticated model, Curie, that was the predecessor to Davinci. When davinci started failing, we switched over to Curie to try to keep the show running without any downtime. The switch to Curie was what resulted in the inappropriate text being generated. We leverage OpenAI’s content moderation tools, which have worked thus far for the Davinci model, but were not successful with Curie. We’ve been able to identify the root cause of our issue with the Davinci model, and will not be using Curie as a fallback in the future. We hope this sheds a little light on how this happened.
The developers insisted that Larry’s comments don’t reflect the opinions of anyone on the team, and they are working to ensure that “nothing like that happens again.” Nonetheless, they are appealing the 14-day Twitch ban.
Were you enjoying Nothing Forever and its Bizarro Jerry AI-generated episodes up until it was banned?
