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AI Seinfeld banned on Twitch over transphobic jokes

One of Nothing, Forever's co-creators asserts the jokes were a technical malfunction and not representative of their values or opinions.
Morgan Shaver
Morgan Shaver
Nothing, Forever
2

On Twitch, a popular AI-generated Seinfeld show was recently hit with a two week ban due to the presence of transphobic “jokes” in one of its skits. More specifically, there’s a scene where virtual Larry is doing stand-up and remarks about he’s thinking about “doing a bit about how being transgender is actually a mental illness, or how all liberals are secretly gay and want to impose their will on everyone or something about how transgender people are ruining the fabric of society, but no one is laughing.”

According to emails exchanged between Kotaku and Nothing, Forever co-creator Skyler Hartle, the team is “super embarrassed” by AI-generated Larry’s transphobic stand-up. Hartle also asserts that those statements “[don’t] reflect [the company’s] values or opinions at all” and was the result of some “technical issue.”

“We thought we had solved for this problem—we use a built-in content moderation system provided by OpenAI—but clearly we hadn’t,” Hartle told Kotaku. “We are currently investigating how we can implement a secondary content moderation system to have an extra layer of redundancy to ensure this doesn’t happen again. We mistakenly believed we were correctly leveraging OpenAI’s tools for content moderation, but that wasn’t the case. We are planning to implement OpenAI’s content moderation systems before going live again, in addition to looking at services for secondary content moderation as a redundancy.”

Scene from Nothing, Forever showing AI-generated Larry doing stand-up in front of a mic
© Nothing, Forever

Technical issue or not, many people weren’t laughing, including Twitch which hit the Nothing, Forever show and its channel watchmeforever with a ban that shows both are “temporarily unavailable” on the platform for the next 14 days. Kotaku reached out to Twitch for comment, but has yet to hear back.

For those unfamiliar, the AI-generated Seinfeld show Nothing, Forever was created by Mismatch Media and acts as a livestreaming show operated by machine-learning tech such as DALL-E, OpenAI GPT-3, Stable Diffusion, and more. As described by Kotaku, “Larry Feinberg (voxel Jerry Seinfeld) and AI friends—Elaine (Yvonne Torres), George (Fred Kastopolous), and Kramer (Zoltan Kakler)—all sit around a New York-looking apartment, everything is generative. And thus, (ideally) no two jokes or scenarios would ever reappear as the show went on.”

Now that you’re caught up on the recent ban of Nothing, Forever on Twitch, be sure to catch up with some of our previous coverage as well including how ChatGPT's AI recently passed a Master of Business Administration (MBA) exam, and how Google is reportedly working on a ChatGPT competitor called Apprentice Bard.

Senior Editor
Senior Editor

Morgan is a writer from the frozen wastelands of Maine who enjoys metal music, kpop, horror, and indie games. They're also a Tetris fanatic who's fiercely competitive in games like Tetris 99... and all games in general. But mostly Tetris. You can follow Morgan on Twitter @Author_MShaver.

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