Update 02/01/2023: Added comment from one of the co-creators. It should also be noted that in the last few minutes, AI has recreated an actual skit from "My Neighbor Seinfeld" (opens in new tab).

AI may be trying to take our jobs and incinerate us to save the planet, but it is also pure fun to see such a variety of technologies blink into the light: the AI Lawyer (opens in new tab) and AI Art Contest (opens in new tab) ) will continue to be debated, but for every huge project with potentially world-changing results, there are a hundred tinkerers doing weird and wonderful things with this nascent technology.

Let me bring you "Nothing, Forever". This is the name of a constant Twitch feed broadcasting AI-generated episodes of "My Neighbor Seinfeld". The creators have avoided using the "S" word at all, but the connection is obvious in the title, logo, and the show itself. In 2012, Jerry Seinfeld said, "'A show about nothing' was just a joke in one episode many years later. ." he said (opens in new tab), "Larry and I are amazed at how the show has become a way for people to express themselves, even to this day.

This is one of the strangest pieces of AI I have ever seen. You need to watch it for a few minutes to get this feeling, but what strikes me most is that the pacing of certain scenes is sometimes so spot-on that many of the jokes the characters make are actually funny. Don't get me wrong, you won't think you've stumbled across a long-lost archive of unreleased material from "My Neighbor Seinfeld," but it's a good thing.

It doesn't always work, and it's confusing to watch. The avatar of "Elaine" appeared to have just tried to sit down and her legs drew a semicircle around her torso before returning to normal. At times, she would be talking and then just stop, the scene would pause and hang in mid-air, unknown algorithms would spin silently and violently, and the Twitch chat would be in suspense.

And the human element of the Twitch chat itself elevates the bizarre to the communal. Good jokes are greeted with great fanfare, certain lines become little mini-memes for a few minutes, the incessant beeping of the microwave oven is now an endearing cameo appearance; there is a sense of rooting for the AI, of sharing in the joy when it succeeds at something, and of being able to share in the joy of the AI's success.

Producer Mismatch Media says, "'Nothing, Forever' is a show that goes on forever and nothing ever happens. It is like the popular sitcoms of the past. The show is incessant and creates new content every minute." Everything you see, hear, and experience (except the artwork and laugh track) is constantly new content, generated by machine learning and AI algorithms" using AI technologies such as Open AI, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E.

The big question I have is where the input data is coming from. The episodes it is generating have aspects of "My Neighbor Seinfeld," even though they are original creations, and the characters, setting, and pacing of the dialogue (when done well) are consistent with "My Neighbor Seinfeld." Is this from the script or the episodes?

When we contacted Mismatch Media about this, we received the following response from one of the show's creators:

"'Nothing, Forever' was originally conceived as an art project four years ago, a parody of the 90s sitcom The idea was to continue forever. Initially, David Lynch's 'Rabbids' was a major creative inspiration, but since then we've evolved a lot."

"We strongly believe that this form of generative media is the future, and our goal is to produce programming that in the future will be as powerful (or even more so) than the terrestrial media being broadcast today."

Unfortunately, Hartl does not specifically mention the "My Neighbor Seinfeld" element of this. He says, "We utilize OpenAI's GPT-3 model for our conversations. The GPT-3 has been trained on the entire Internet corpus, so it has context on a great many different things." [So the AI show "My Neighbor Seinfeld" may or may not be based on "My Neighbor Seinfeld."