‘Nothing, Forever,’ an AI ‘Seinfeld’ spoof, is the next ‘Twitch Plays Pokémon’

“So, I was at the store the other day, and as I’m checking out, the cashier asks me if I have any coupons, and I say, ‘No coupon problem!’” recalls a pixelated, barely three-dimensional figure that vaguely resembles Jerry Seinfeld. “So I’m walking down the street, and this guy comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ and I say, ‘It’s going coupon!’”

An automated laugh track plays, but the joke doesn’t make sense. Then again, it doesn’t have to make sense.

“Nothing, Forever” is a never-ending, AI-generated spoof of “Seinfeld,” the show about nothing. It’s been streaming on Twitch since December, and until a few days ago, the stream had an average of about four concurrent viewers. Now, at the moment I write this, there are 15,097 people watching a group of badly animated friends — Larry Feinberg, Fred Kastopolous, Yvonne Torres and Zoltan Kalker — cycling through infinite “Seinfeld”-like scenes with very little plot.

The show has been streaming almost non-stop on Twitch since December, but it only reached a wider audience this week, when its creators slowly started promoting the stream on Reddit. Now, “Nothing, Forever” has over 98,000 followers on Twitch, and a Discord with about 6,000 members.

Behind the project are Skyler Hartle, a senior product manager at Microsoft, and Brian Habersberger, a polymer physicist. They call themselves Mismatch Media, though this venture remains a side project.

Aptly, the duo met online while playing “Team Fortress 2” and they kept in touch over time. Four years ago, they started working on creative projects together.

“It kind of started its journey as a kind of art project that Brian approached me with, and we ended up collaborating and working on it together and iterating on it over the last four years,” Hartle told TechCrunch. “The show we’re creating is really cool, and scratches that creative itch as just a surreal, fun kind of project, but we saw the merit of generative technology as a tool for broad scale content creation and generation.”

To make “Nothing, Forever,” Hartle and Habersberger use various AI models to generate text, speech, and movements. The “script” of the show comes from an Open AI’s GPT-3 model, Davinci. To voice the characters, they use the Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services speech API, and the visuals are made on the Unity game engine.

“The Unity engine just does a lot of interpretation to basically run the show and inherit all this content, and the voices, and all these kinds of other pieces of direction from what we call ‘the director’ in the cloud,” Hartle said. “And the director dictates what happens on the show from a generative perspective.”

They set out to create a surrealist, never-ending television show, and it simply made sense to base it on “Seinfeld,” a show that has defined the structure of a sitcom.

“A sitcom has a laugh track and a sort of formulaic structure,” Habersberger told TechCrunch. “So when characters are saying things that don’t quite make sense, but the structure is one that you’re very familiar with, it really helps you to interpret and make sense of it, even though the sense isn’t there.”

AI dialogue can get repetitive. Characters are constantly referencing new restaurants and stores to the point that it’s become an in-joke. On a fan-made “Nothing, Forever” bingo generator, the free space is “New thing!”

Per the nascent wiki, some new places include a new type of bagel (it’s shaped like an octopus, and called the octobagel), a new shake shop (they serve pickles in their shakes), a new taco truck (they sell tacos and burgers) and a new all-you-can-eat buffet (nothing but pink flamingo wings!). One of the few interactive items in Larry’s apartment is a microwave, a prop that characters frequently and inexplicably use in ways that have no bearing on the plot — the microwave has spurred a fandom of its own, custom Discord emojis and all.

“To take that idea even further, ‘Seinfeld’ is famously the show about nothing. What could be more nothing than a robot, right?” said Habersberger. “And then even further with ‘Seinfeld,’ there was a period of fifteen years or so where you could just turn on the TV, and if you flip through the channels, there’s a good chance it’s on, because it was syndicated […] So I was like, wait, now it can really be always on.”

We’ve all seen far too many AI-generated gimmicks, but the AI isn’t what’s most interesting about “Nothing, Forever.” It’s the community that’s gathered around the stream, making the project feel like this generation’s “Twitch Plays Pokémon.”

Image Credits: Nothing, Forever (opens in a new window)

In 2014, an anonymous Australian streamer set up a channel where fans could collaboratively play “Pokémon Red,” pressing buttons and moving the player character via Twitch chat commands. When enough players got involved, the stream turned into chaos. (The route through Rock Tunnel is confusing enough, but imagine navigating it with thousands of people clamoring to control the character’s movement.)

Yet over the two weeks it took to beat the game, fans built deep lore to explain why the character was behaving so erratically. No, we didn’t keep opening our bag to look at the Helix Fossil because of the chaotic button mashing in the chat; indeed, it was because our player character worshiped the Helix Fossil like a deity.

In the same vein, “Nothing, Forever” fans try to parse dialogue to learn more about the universe of the show. On Discord, fans requested a new channel to keep track of new lore as it develops; one page on the wiki chronicles what we know from past mentions of aliens. The community also keeps track of Larry’s recurring standup jokes, which are pretty bad (“What do you call a bear with no teeth? A gummy bear”), but somehow get funnier the more they’re repeated.

“The way that the chat is engaging, they’re kind of creating their own memes and their own culture,” said Hartle. “We’ve had people who have reached out wanting to be community mods and have been watching the show for eight hours at a time.”

Like “Twitch Plays Pokémon,” the creators of “Nothing, Forever” hope to include audience participation features in the future. Hartle told TechCrunch that there are not currently any interactivity features embedded in the livestream, though some fans began theorizing that they were causing Larry to repeat his jokes by getting excited when he talked about gummy bears again.

Mismatch Media hopes they can repurpose the tech stack behind “Nothing, Forever” into an actual system for creating generative media projects. For now, Hartle and Habersburger are taking things slow with their newfound popularity. They’ve been able to make a bit of money from Patreon and Twitch subscriptions, but it’s still unclear how long it will take for the novelty of “Nothing, Forever” to wear off.

Sudden virality can’t last forever. “Twitch Plays Pokémon” became an ongoing series after the completion of the first game, but fan engagement dropped drastically once the excitement around the initial experiment died down. Now, we just fondly remember it as a time when the internet felt less hellish, capturing the same lightning in a bottle as projects like r/Place.

Similarly, it’s difficult to predict how long “Nothing, Forever” will retain its fanbase, and whether or not people would find more joy if the creators started other constant, AI-based sitcom spoofs.

For now, it’s a simple delight to just click off Twitter and watch Larry tell the same jokes over and over.

“What did the fish say when it swam into a wall?”

“Dam!”

‘Nothing, Forever,’ an AI ‘Seinfeld’ spoof, is the next ‘Twitch Plays Pokémon’ by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch