Originally published at: There's an endless AI generated Seinfeld episode running on Twitch | Boing Boing
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Now, see–this is the AI art that I’m here for. This is fantastically strange. And nobody’s losing commission.
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The AI Revolution will be… boring, apparently.
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Yeah but the AI audiences are still eating it up.
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Reminds me of David Lynch’s “Rabbits”:
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Fake Seinfeld just told an outro-joke the moment I tuned in, the team was just gliding out to a movie…
I saw a guy carrying a ladder.
And I thought to myself, “Wow. It must be great being an escalator repair man.”
And so I asked him, “How do you become an escalator repair man?”
And he said, “It’s easy. You just climb the ladder of success.”
And I realized that’s not the whole story.
Someone else could step on your rung.
You have to be careful, climbing the ladder of success.
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Someone needs to take this and run it through the package that will deep fake voices based on a small sample.
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Just came across the clips archive. Apparently… it made your joke earlier this week. 
“Have you heard? Scientists have created an AI that can do standup comedy.”
“Are they sure it’s funny? What if it’s only funny to robots?”
Under Goes Meta: Twitch
becomes self aware is another clip that’s kind of crazy. The authors have to have to have seeded it with some information about the environment it’s in.
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Hartle went on to say: “As generative media gets better, we have this notion that at any point, you’re gonna be able to turn on the future equivalent of Netflix and watch a show perpetually, nonstop as much as you want. You don’t just have seven seasons of a show, you have seven hundred, or infinite seasons of a show that has fresh content whenever you want it. And so that became one of our grounding pillars.”
I thought this whole project was pointing out the absurdity of that idea. I mean, it acts as pretty good proof to the contrary - where it succeeds, it does so because it “fails.” It’s only interesting when it gets weird, when it breaks - when the characters are having conversations not facing each other, they weirdly levitate into chairs (sometimes face-down), they say things that don’t make sense, the laugh track kicks in when it isn’t remotely funny, “Larry” does a stand-up routine where he’s silent for 10 minutes. If it were all comprehensible and “working,” it would just be incredibly boring.
And that’s part of a fundamental misunderstanding these AI evangelists are making - “comprehensible” is not remotely the same as “good” or even “watchable.” Sure, the AI output is getting increasingly comprehensible, but you could get some human beings to just improvise comprehensible dialog for hours at a time much more cheaply than scripting it… but no one wants to watch that. (Just listening to the conversations of strangers in public is more interesting, as at least you’re getting a glimpse into an actual person’s life.) We want to watch fictional things that are funny, dramatic, romantic, etc. The idea that an algorithm, remixing existing text in fundamentally random ways, is actually going to be as good (or better!) as the output of actual humans, much less a team of human writers, no matter how bad, is completely laughable. One of the hallmarks of a bad writer is that they’re unoriginal and bring nothing new to the material - with AI, that’s the best you can hope for.
Then we get into the issue of the impossibility of narrative structure in an endless stream of “content,” even if the content is good. This “content stream” idea works for something like Seinfeld, which is famous for being “about nothing” and being fundamentally narratively static, and… that’s about it. (And I’m not even sure about Seinfeld - I never watched more than a few minutes, so I have no idea if the characters actually did undergo any kind of subtle narrative arcs or changes over time.)
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The best part of the whole project is still (I assume) human-generated: the Twitch audience’s reaction in the scrolling chat below. They comment, add their own fake laughs to the laughtrack, call out the character’s names with joy, and go crazy when certain glitches or repetitions happen.
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I’ve been putting this on as background noise while cleaning, baking, or playing No Mans Sky in VR. It’s actually a pretty nice ‘noise generator’ that gives the same dopamine hits that running an actual show does (the half heard jokes, the laughter, the abstract feeling of companionship). I can totally see different genera of shows like this replacing having talk radio at volume ‘1’ or the weather channel for people that work alone but need something making noise in the background to be able to function well.
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“The actual impetus for this was it originally started its life as this weird, very, off-center kind of nonsensical, surreal art project,” Hartle said. “But then we kind of worked over the years to bring it to this new place. And then, of course, generative media and generative AI just kind of took off in a crazy way over the past couple of years.”
Translation: We feel safe in dropping this lumpy AI turd into everyone’s lap… because – well – everyone else is doing it.
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Frankly I see this as a piece of fine conceptual art. If anything it’s a great criticism of the tool–something banal made even more banal by the addition of this eternal automation. It’s… kinda nihilistic and disturbing, and that’s the only reason it works for me. If this was made by tech bros aiming to “cash in” on a current craze, it’s not successful.
Also: if Dante could have conceived of an endless existence in Jerry’s apartment, I’m sure this would have made it into a canto.
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If so, then their explanations were effectively spin. Something about tech bro spin. 
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I don’t know, it’s kinda addictive. The way they “sit” is hilarious.
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… maybe they should simulate Mork and Mindy 
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I had a similar experience. It was oddly pleasant to have this going on in the background. It seems to tick the same box as listening to mediocre podcasts while doing chores, but with the added reassurance that at no point will anyone do a hot take, say anything thirsty or make any other such move to deliberately grab my attention or get me riled up about something.
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This is fascinating and surprisingly coherent. I tuned in to witness an exchange between Jerry and Elaine:
J: This place is like a pinball machine. How does anyone get anything done?
E: That’s what I said. It’s just like a pinball machine. You get bounced around beyond your control but have to figure out the rules to win.
That’s… weirdly deep, yet clearly also gibberish.
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See also the Zizek/Herzog AI…
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Why the wink?
