AI Seinfeld: the show about nothing is back – and now it’s written by robots

Seinfeld went off the air in 1998, but it's never really gone away - it's been the subject of modern recreations, dedicated social media accounts and hip-hop/TV fusions. Its latest incarnation, however, is the oddest yet.

Nothing, Forever is an endless, AI-generated version of the show that has been streaming on Twitch since mid-December. It tells the "story" - if you can call it that - of four characters, Larry, Fred, Yvonne and Kakler, who look like what would happen if Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer were sucked into a 1990s computer game. They spend their days discussing their lives and other trivial matters. And it never, ever stops: log on at any hour and there they are, talking about coffee quality or a difficult Monopoly game.

The dialogue comes from OpenAI's GPT-3, a text generator closely related to the ChatGPT service that has recently made waves; another company is responsible for the tech behind the speech itself. On top of that, "we have a lot of proprietary generative algorithms that cause the show to be 'formed', so to be speak," Skyler Hartle of Mismatch Media told Polygon. "We collectively call this logic the 'director', as it is largely responsible for making sure all the individual pieces come together into a whole."

I watched 22 minutes of Nothing, Forever, to parallel the experience of a single episode of Seinfeld, and I don't think comedy writers need to fear for their jobs just yet. I didn't laugh once, despite the encouragement of an aggressively enthusiastic laugh track.

But then, that's not really the point. Begun as a "nonsensical, surreal art project", as Hartle told Vice, it's a casually dystopian experience that serves mainly to demonstrate the potential of artificial intelligence - as stunning as it is alarming.

When I opened the stream, Larry and Fred were doing what they're always doing: drifting aimlessly around an apartment, their bodies undulating eerily. When they're not spending an unhealthy amount of time fiddling with the microwave, they're plunging face-first into the sofa before suddenly re-materializing in an upright position.

In this particular scene, Fred, George's analogue, is telling his best friend about a new partner. "She's different than any other girl I've ever dated," he says.