With the dramatic expansion of artificial intelligence-generated text, the speed and frequency of the internet’s milkshake-ducking has become all the more essential. If you believe that problematic speech is the same as violence, it’s hard enough to be on the lookout for material generated by living and breathing human beings — now you have a horde of AI chatbots to monitor as well. And unlike their human counterparts, these chatbots lack the shame and fear to prevent them from saying things at odds with cultural trends.
Consider the latest example of this, which comes with the Twitch stream “Nothing, Forever,” an AI-and-video-game-engine-generated parody of Seinfeld that has been streaming for several months.
The show contains many recognizable elements from the TV series, with the star, Larry, performing his standup as bits, and interacting with his friends Yyvonne (Elaine), Fred (George) and Kakler (Kramer) in his apartment. The auto-generated script is often surreal and amusing, and rarely makes sense. The project only recently attracted expanded attention after being featured at VICE‘s Motherboard last week, with tens of thousands tuning in.
Of course, an expanded audience means expanded attention to potentially offensive material, which must be stopped at all costs. So not even a week after the Motherboard report, the stream was suspended by Twitch because the AI had produced some comments on transgender people deemed in violation of Twitch’s terms of service.
That resulted in this bizarre VICE lede:
“Nothing, Forever,” the infinitely-generating AI version of Seinfeld that tens of thousands of people were watching has been banned for fourteen days from Twitch after Larry Feinberg — a clone of Jerry Seinfeld — made transphobic statements during a standup bit late Sunday night.
You can see the bit in question here, where the AI gets a little too Jordan Peterson for Twitch’s hall monitors:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qxcouuH3u0
In the bit, the character says:
There’s like fifty people here and no one is laughing. Anyone have any suggestions? I’m 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, so I’m going to stop. Thanks for coming out tonight. See you next time. Where’d everybody go?
While the AI seems to be implying that Larry’s proposed topics were deemed unfunny by the audience, that’s not enough for Twitch. Time for the chatbot to spend two weeks in timeout, thinking about what it did wrong and learning to be a better ally. On Discord, one of the creators of the stream said they were appealing the decision, but “regardless of the outcome of the appeal, we’ll be back and will spend the time working to ensure to the best of our abilities that nothing like that happens again.”
The same day that “Nothing Forever” was suspended, real-life comedian Dave Chappelle won his fourth Grammy for his Netflix special The Closer, which has been tagged by the humorless as transphobic and criticized because, among other things, he aligns himself with author J.K. Rowling, pronouncing himself “team TERF.”
Humans remain very difficult to reprogram, but the cancelers are dogged in their commitment. They’re confident they’ll figure it out eventually.
