Transphobic AI Seinfeld!
An AI version of Seinfeld was banned for making a transphobic joke on Twitch. Like many transphobic comedicans in real life, it never actually made a joke.
by Evan Urquhart
Somehow, the sum total of human ingenuity has led us to this moment. A popular Twitch channel was created featuring AI knockoffs of Jerry, Elaine, Kramer, and George saying bland things in robotic text-to-speech voices. Called Nothing, Forever, the show’s humor came from the jerky movements of its characters, the inappropriately timed laugh track, and the fact that it existed at all.
The uncanny valley of it all then got even more uncanny when fake AI Seinfeld got banned from Twitch for 14 days after the AI stand-up commedian made some transphobic comments. Specifically, Seinfeld-analogue Larry said, “So, this is my stand-up set at a club. There’s, like, 50 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.”
According to reporting by Kotaku, one of the co-creators of Nothing, Forever, Skyler Hartle, said he was embarrassed by the incident, which he blamed on technical difficulties.
screenshot from Kotaku
Perhaps the most depressing part of this whole thing is that, like most of Nothing, Forever’s content, the “transphobic joke” that got the AI banned from Twitch wasn’t a joke at all. The AI, when asked to make jokes, produced some extremely transphobic phrases that seem to have been borrowed from the extreme right, bookended by the observation that no one was laughing.
In theory, you’d think that real life comedians would do a better job of actually making jokes, but in practice the AI was closer than you might think. Much of stand-up comedy today consists of saying something, complaining that you’re not allowed to say it, then saying it again. In that sense, Nothing, Forever seems to have captured the very heart of what it means to do stand-up comedy in the present year.