Literally a show about nothing.
If you like comedy, chances are you’re familiar with Seinfeld. And if you haven’t been under a rock the past week or so, you may have heard about Nothing Forever, which is very clearly meant to be an endless episode of Seinfeld.
The name clues you in to the conection. You know, in case the four pixelated constructs that vaguely look like Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer didn’t. The funny thing about the “show about nothing” bit is that the fact that people picked it up and ran with it puzzles both Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David; it’s not the original pitch for the show, but an in episode pitch from a season 4 episode.
The pitch for the show, the real pitch, when Larry and I went to NBC in 1988, was we want to show how a comedian gets his material. The show about nothing was just a joke in an episode many years later, and Larry and I to this day are surprised that it caught on as a way that people describe the show, because to us it’s the opposite of that.
Jerry Seinfeld
Anyway, back to Nothing Forever. It runs, presumably, forever. And slings “jokes” without thought, soul, or wit. Hell, it even did one that Seinfeld actually did to results you can view here. Anyway, I’m not amused, and that might be the worst thing you can say about an endless sitcom. At least with something like, say, Friends, I can hate it.
As the creators, Mismatch Media describe it, though:
Nothing, Forever is a show about nothing, that happens forever. Kinda like popular sitcoms of the past, except that it never stops.
Nothing, Forever is always-on, runs 365 days of the year, and delivers new content every minute.
Everything you see, hear, or experience (with the exception of the artwork and laugh track) is always brand new content, generated via machine learning and AI algorithms.
PC Gamer asked them about just how their AI goes about getting material. And they responded:
Nothing, Forever was initially conceived as an art project four years ago, a parody of ‘90s sitcoms that ran forever and was broadcast on Twitch, as we (my co creator Brian Habersberger and I) felt like that was the best channel for it with its community based approach. A big creative inspiration initially was David Lynch’s Rabbits, but we’ve evolved a lot since then.
We’re strong believers that these forms of generative media are the future, and our bar is to produce a show that is just as strong (or stronger) as any terrestrial media airing right now in the future.
We leverage OpenAI’s GPT-3 model for the conversational dialogue. GPT-3 is trained on the entire corpus of the internet, so it has context on a ton of different things, and we use its tooling to generate our outputs, actually, for the most part.
Skyler Hartle
Well, it’s gonna run forever. I’d still argue, however, that it’s got an uphill battle if it wants to eclipse, or even reach, the heights of its obvious inspiration.
EDIT: It seems that, as I slept, Nothing Forever has been cancelled. In the internet sense, not the broadcasting sense. The source of this cancellation? Below:
Mismatch Media devs explained the possible cause of the issue over on Discord:
We started having an outage using OpenAI’s GPT-3 Davinci model, which caused the show to exhibit errant behaviors (you may have seen empty rooms cycling through). OpenAI has a less sophisticated model, Curie, that was the predecessor to Davinci. When davinci started failing, we switched over to Curie to try to keep the show running without any downtime. The switch to Curie was what resulted in the inappropriate text being generated.
They have appealed their Twitch ban, but I suppose you’ll have to sub traditional Seinfeld for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Seinfeld for the time being.
Source: PC Gamer
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