Twitch Temporarily Bans A.I.-Generated ‘Seinfeld’ Parody

Nothing, Forever, an A.I.-generated Seinfeld parody, has been temporarily removed from Twitch — where it had been streaming around the clock — for violating terms of service. The show was created by a physicist and a programmer. In an interview with Vice, Skyler Hartle, one of the show’s creators, described the vibe of the show.

The actual impetus for this was it originally started its life as this weird, very, off-center kind of nonsensical, surreal art project. But then we kind of worked over the years to bring it to this new place. And then, of course, generative media and generative AI just kind of took off in a crazy way over the past couple of years.

The show stars a character named Larry, a parody of Jerry Seinfeld. Larry is joined by parodies of Elaine, George, and Kramer, named Yvonne, Fred, and Kakler, respectively. But Nothing, Forever was recently and temporarily banned from Twitch after its computer-generated stories took a turn for the worst. As with any episode of Seinfeld, the show opens with Feinberg doing stand-up at a comedy club in front of a brick wall before running into the main narrative of the episode. In this particular episode, ChatGPT generated some rather transphobic rhetoric that included the line “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.”

It’s not really a joke at all. In a statement, Hartle wrote about the controversy “we are embarrassed, and this doesn’t reflect our values or opinions at all. This was the result of a mistake on our side that resulted in a technical issue.” The creators behind Nothing, Forever blamed the incident on a glitch that forced the show to switch to a program that did not include content moderation. The show can resume after the end of its 14 day ban on Twitch.