Nothing forever, The AI-generated and Seinfeld-inspired Twitch stream, which first launched in December 2022, is coming back online. The company behind the surreal maelstrom of animated ’90s New York nostalgia, Mismatch Media, announced the show’s return on Tuesday night on twitter. The rumored never-ending stream is scheduled to restart Wednesday at 8:00 p.m. ET (5:00 p.m. Pacific).
Previously, Twitch took over Nothing forever Temporarily offline after its main character “Larry Feinberg” started spewing out transphobic and homophobic AI-generated content. Portions of the show are vaguely similar in structure to actual ones His field episodes, albeit much shorter. Each “episode” of Nothing forever contains a stand-up interlude in which the cartoon Feinberg speaks into a microphone on a stage.
At one such moment, the animated faux comedian went into extensive anti-LGBTQ ranting (much like some other real-world comedians have done in recent years). “I’m thinking about doing a little bit of thinking about transgendering actually being 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’s laughing, so I’m quitting,” the animated stand-up comedian said during the interlude of an “episode.”
Twitch has a code of conduct that specifically prohibits hateful or discriminatory material related to sexuality and gender identity. The platform was closed for the violation Nothing forever Down for at least 14 days in early February.
Subsequently one of the founders of Mismatch Media and a developer behind it His field-like stream, Skyler Hartle took to Discord to try and explain what happened. According to Hartle’s initial post, the problems began to surface when the OpenAI GPT-3 Davinci model powering the stream began to fail. In response, the developers switched to a backup: Curie. Under this contingency plan, the content allegedly turned sideways.
In a later update, Hartle and co-developer Brian Habersberger added that they “mistakenly” believed OpenAI’s content moderation system was in place and set up guardrails Nothing forever and Larry Feinberg. It obviously wasn’t. In the February post, the developers stated that they would implement content moderation for the stream before it returned and would add a backup.
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Content moderation, algorithmic bias, and the tendency to generate offensive and hateful material are some of the biggest problems facing generative AI technology. Extensive (and brutal) filtering aside, the training data fed to large language models and other artificial intelligences contain all the usual human impulses and biases—whether we like it or not.
Fingers crossed that Larry Feinberg has learned his/her lesson and knows better in this revamped iteration. And even if the stream doesn’t quite reach its goal of lasting forever, maybe this time, Nothing forever will remain online for more than a few months.