AI-generated ‘Seinfeld’ suspended from Twitch after making transphobic jokes

The never-ending, AI-generated episode of Seinfeld, titled Nothing, Forever, has been suspended from Twitch after making transphobic jokes.

Dialogue from the animation is almost entirely generated by algorithms, prompting the characters to engage in simple conversations that often tail off into nonsensical tangents and glitches.

Like the hit ’80s sitcom, Nothing, Forever often cuts to footage of Jerry Seinfeld performing stand-up comedy. However, some of the recent AI-generated dialogue included a transphobic rant, prompting Twitch to hand the animation a 14-day ban.

The AI Seinfeld recently stated: “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?”

The Twitch page for the Nothing, Forever currently displays a message saying is is “temporarily unavailable due to a violation of Twitch’s Community Guidelines or Terms of Service”.

The animation’s creators clarified that the transphobic routine was a mistake, and that they are working to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

In a statement to The Verge, Skyler Hartle, co-creator of Nothing, Forever, wrote: “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.”

In the project’s Discord, a staff member explained that the error was a result of the AI model being switched to a model with weaker moderation tools.

“Earlier tonight, we started having an outage using OpenAI’s GPT-3 Davinci model, which caused the show to exhibit errant behaviours (you may have seen empty rooms cycling through),” wrote a staff member under the name TinyLobsta.

“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.”

Before its suspension, Nothing, Forever proved to be reasonably popular, maintaining an audience of roughly 15,000 viewers.

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