The AI Seinfeld show is bugging out harder than Frank Costanza on Festivus
Twitch’s AI-generated Nothing Forever stream caused a massive sensation when it launched back in February. This is the internet, however, so it wasn’t long before the stream’s Seinfeld-like protagonist started spewing hateful anti-trans rhetoric, leading to a ban on the streaming platform. Now it’s back, but experiencing some serious bugs that could end the enterprise entirely.
It started on October 27, when viewers began noticing that the characters had stopped talking, instead standing in absolute silence for hours on end, as reported by Kotaku. After that, a strange orange man appeared to silently patrol the apartment. On October 30 things got even weirder, with 404 Media’s Jason Koebler sharing a video of two primary characters walking into one another over and over again. This continued for days.
The characters of AI Seinfeld have been walking into a refrigerator on a loop for at least five days. Creators are MIA. A show that was meant to last "forever" is fully broken 9 months in. People have been showing up to watch it on Twitch to pay respectshttps://t.co/RgDOdyGoKE
— Jason Koebler (@jason_koebler) October 30, 2023
This is ongoing, with characters sitting silently for long periods of time, sometimes staring at one another, sometimes just walking into walls or in place. Once in a while they just flail their arms for a few hours. These bizarre bugs have, unsurprisingly, ticked up the viewer count. As of this writing, the stream boasts hundreds of concurrent watchers, which is much more than last month after the shine had dulled upon returning from the depths of its hate speech time out.
The stream’s creators, Mismatch Media, haven’t responded to inquiries regarding the numerous and sometimes hilarious errors. It made some big changes to the stream after the anti-trans incident, swapping some of the characters and abandoning the stand-up routine segments. Mismatch also implemented “secondary content moderation systems as redundancies.”
Despite being primarily AI-driven, the stream likely still requires a fair amount of maintenance, and maybe the creators just don’t feel like keeping up with it. The stream has been running constantly since December, but who knows how long the “forever” part of Nothing Forever will end up lasting. It's worth noting that the stream isn't always buggy, as once in a while characters participate in a normal (ish) conversation.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai-seinfeld-show-bugging-harder-175822559.html?src=rss