Feb 3, 2023

AI-generated "Seinfeld Next Door" animation goes viral on Twitch

UPDATE: "Nothing, Forever" has been banned by Twitch for 14 days after its lead character, Larry Feinberg, made a transphobic remark during a standup comedy scene.

Few sitcoms have had as long a following as "My Neighbor Seinfeld," and the show is now memorialized by a never-ending AI-generated animated adaptation streaming on Twitch.

The stream, titled "Stream Nothing,Forever," was released last December 14 and has been streaming on the Twitch channel Watchmeforever ever since, launched by a group called Mismatched Media, When describing the project on the channel, they avoid real names and quotes from "My Neighbor Seinfeld":

"Nothing, Forever" is a show about nothing that happens forever. Like popular sitcoms of the past, Nothing, Forever is always-on, delivering new content every minute, 365 days a year. Everything you see, hear, and experience (except the artwork and laugh track) is always new content, generated by machine learning and AI algorithms.

What is done by AI and what is done by humans - according to a Reddit post made by Skylar Hartl of Mismatch at the channel's launch, only the artwork and laugh track are artificially created. The dialogue, speech, direction (camera cuts, character focus, shot length, scene length, etc.), character movement, and music are all algorithmically generated.

The way the show works - what could be called an "episode" - begins just like a real show, with Jerry holding a microphone and telling jokes at a comedy club. After the set, a crude block version of the scene plays, with the four main characters from "Seinfeld Next Door" talking in robotic faltering voices, sometimes humorously, sometimes incomprehensibly.

There are also occasional breaks when the 1990s-style "Watch Forever" channel (clearly modeled after the TV Guide channel of the day) scrolls through a daily schedule of real and created movie and series titles.

Popularity - At the time of writing, Nothing, Forever has 97,900 followers and a very active chat log. It also offers a $4.99/month subscription option, but subscriber numbers are not disclosed by Twitch, so it is not known how many people are paying for the content.

What technology is used to keep the stream going - When the show launched, Hartle's Reddit post described the collection of programs used to generate Nothing, Forever:

Nothing, Forever is built using a combination of machine learning, generative algorithms (we use "generative" here, not in the academic sense), and cloud services. Our stack consists of Python + TensorFlow for the ML model, TypeScript + Azure Functions and Heroku for the backend, and C# + Unity for the client, with some neural voice APIs mixed in.

Hartle also said there are plans to implement OpenAI's Davinci model to spice up the dialogue and Stable Diffusion for art generation.

Is "Nothing, Forever" any good - Although currently going viral, the novelty of "Nothing, Forever" wears off fairly quickly as the jokes are repeated and the visual humor of the low-polygon Seinfeld world wears off. There seems to be no danger of human-made animated programs being quickly supplanted by this show.