Twitch channel Watchmeforever, the host of the hit AI sitcom Nothing, Forever, has been banned on Twitch after one of the AI characters performed a transphobic stand-up comedy set where nobody laughed.For those who haven't seen it, Nothing, Forever is basically a Seinfeld spoof, except the show uses a variety of AIs to create everything from scratch. AI's include the art-generating Dall-E, the D&D campaign-creating ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and others. And because AI hasn't quite figured out how to do comedy, the show is... well, bad, but in a funny way. The on-screen characters are often just wandering around, their arms contorted in bizarre directions, engaged in stilted conversations where they’re not even looking at each other. The jokes are lame, the laugh track cuts in during the setup but not the punchline, and there are long stretches of silence where literally nothing happens.And just like Seinfeld, each in-apartment scene is separated by a brief stand-up routine from Larry Feinberg, the pixilated AI version of Jerry Seinfeld. Only the latest stand-up routine was even less funny than usual because it was a transphobic and homophobic rant.
"So, this is my stand-up set at a club. There’s, like, 50 people here and no one is laughing. Anyone have any suggestions?" Larry asked. "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."
Larry was right about one thing: no one was laughing. Especially not Twitch, which banned the Watchmeforever channel soon after this episode aired.
In an email to Kotaku, Nothing, Forever co-creator Skyler Hartle explained what went wrong with Larry's programming.
"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, said Hartle. "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."
Nothing, Forever will return, but only after Larry and the gang have had their silicon heads checked.