So there’s now an entirely AI generated, continuously running Seinfeld-pastiche show on Twitch called ‘Nothing, Forever’. It mainly seems to consist of minute-long absurd vignettes between its central characters, with interspersed laughter (no correlation to either purposeful, attempted, or accidental jokes I can discern), in a sort of voxel-graphic style.
It’s… well, expectably weird, I suppose, but weird in strange ways, sometimes hovering just about on the threshold of making sense, then abruptly veering off in a different direction altogether. Not sure what to make of it, but it’s surprisingly easy to get sucked in for a few minutes; it sort of seems to generate a weird anticipation that’s never resolved, like a joke whose punchline is endlessly deferred.
That sounds like 83% of all the sitcoms and 98% of SNL sketches I’ve watched. A world of expectant anticipatory pauses (with our without canned / studio-audience laughter) while I’m wondering what point I’m missing or why it would be funny to someone.
It seems like the AI just thinks laughter is how you end a scene in a sitcom. The rest seems to just be trying to mimic a normal conversation. It has no idea that laughter is supposed to come after jokes.
Sitcoms are actually my favorite TV genre. One camera, three camera, laugh track, no laugh track - it doesn’t matter to me. That said, the last thing I want to watch is a series of one-minute absurd vignettes that stretch on into the endless future.
That is the risk of using an AI that gets its training data from the internet. People say a lot of racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist, etc. stuff on the internet. Left unchecked, the AI is going to start repeating that stuff.