There’s always something to watch on Twitch. your favorite musician is talking about video games Also Favorite streamers discussing politicsYour choices include silly and often nonsensical ones my neighbor seinfeldSuch shows that run 24/7 and are generated on-the-fly using artificial intelligence. Welcome to the future of TV?
Recently, so-called AI has become a hot topic. The technology, which typically uses machine learning to generate text, images and even video from existing data sets, is used in art, article and essay writing, even video gamesIt’s almost impossible to escape the discourse these days, especially if you spend time online or read the news. I feel like Perhaps that’s especially true after a Twitch channel has suddenly gone hot. watch over foreveruses AI to create every element of an endless TV show.
Watchmeforever was started by media lab Mismatch Media and operates 24/7. my neighbor seinfeldlike, like a sitcom nothing, foreverUsing generative machine learning techniques such as DALL-E, OpenAI GPT-3, and Stable Diffusion, the resulting video is a gritty Xerox from Larry David’s ’90s sitcom. There’s Elaine (aka “Yvonne Torres”), George (Fred Custoporus), Kramer (Zoltan Kukler), and of course Jerry (Larry Feinberg), all living in what appears to be New York. . Stately metropolis.
But while the shows are clearly similar, my neighbor seinfeld, it doesn’t retain its charm or comedy. In fact, it’s not just awkward, it’s weird and creepy. Looks like his PS1 voxel game that was rejected. The characters flutter when you move, the camera angles are weirdly placed with the weirdest zoom-ins I’ve ever seen, and the writing is pretty flat. Considering the whole thing was created using artificial intelligence, it makes sense.
There’s even a stand-up comedy portion, just like in Seinfeld, and laugh tracks that attempt to reinforce the supposed punchlines. At one point during the show, Larry made this joke about animals eating clowns, asking the crowd why such a thing might happen. “Because they taste funny,” Larry quipped. There was a long bit of silence—customary for Nothing, Forever—before the laugh track briefly popped in, only to be cut short by the even more awkward transitional music. And because this is an endless, AI-generated show, none of these jokes are likely to ever appear again.
But maybe that’s why I, and some 3,000 other people at the time of this writing, can’t stop watching Mismatch Media’s Nothing, Forever. It’s weird, sure, but it’s also alluring in its unsettling production. Everything in the show is stiff and artificial. The voice “acting” especially is rough around the edges. Still, Nothing, Forever has this strange ability to capture my attention as I watch discount Jerry and friends stand around the apartment, often talking about nothing between spates of empty silence.
Read More: rick and morty Creator Used Controversial AI Art And Voiced In New Shooter
The idea of technology spawning endless ’90s-style sitcoms is undeniably novel. That said, like any intersection of AI and media these days, this machine-generated content feels like a slippery slope that could uproot your entire career, creative or otherwise.
in an email exchange with Kotakuco-creator Skyler Hartle said he and his co-creator Brian Herbersberger have been working part-time on “passion projects” in teams of three to seven people for the past four years. With all the AI tools at their disposal, including Azure Cognitive Services for speech generation, Hartle believes the team will be able to “create new shows and formats.”
“The idea started as an art project: a generative show that will forever create ‘nothing’ for people to listen to,” says Hartle. “As creators, we thought it was really interesting [and] It’s a new space to explore conceptually, but quite early on we started to see the potential to create a platform that would help foster the creation of this kind of generative media in addition to the show. ChatGPT/GPT-3/Stable Diffusion didn’t exist when it was released, but recent advances have made it more and more likely that these types of shows could be one way into the future. I can see it. ”
Inspired by David Lynch’s 2002 short horror anthology. RabbitHartle saw 90s sitcoms as “the perfect medium to target” and said the team wanted to “make something that lasts forever.” According to Hartle, the channel has been growing steadily, and the chat has become “one of the best parts of him,” thanks in large part to the memes people are sharing. Hartle hopes the show and his AI tech will enable creators and have little to no negative impact on television production.
“The goal of this project and our platform is to enable more creators, not less,” said Hartle. “We want to enable people with limited resources to realize their creative visions, and we see this kind of technology as the backbone of that.”
While enjoying the absurdity nothing, foreverWhen used appropriately and sparingly, AI may make life a little easier. But capitalists want to increase production as much as possible for as little money as possible, so for at least some types of artists and other creatives who currently make a living from art, writing is on the wall. I am afraid that nothing, forever It’s great for sure, but you have to wonder where this sort of thing will lead in the end.