David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest is about marijuana addiction and a spate of deaths caused by a looped video so mesmerizing viewers do not unglue themselves to eat or drink. The author never says what’s in the video, but it could’ve easily been an AI-generated parody of Seinfeld. 

On December 14, Skyler Hartle, a senior project manager at Microsoft, and Brian Habersberger, a photovoltaic encapsulant materials scientist at Dow Chemical, launched an art project on Twitch. They had a company draw a Minecraft-y version of the Seinfeld sets, created characters with automaton-edged voices, and gave the AI text-generator GPT-3 a broad prompt: characters in a room together having a humorous conversation. Because Seinfeld claimed to be about nothing, and because the AI could generate new material 24 hours a day, they called it Nothing, Forever.

Hartle posted about his creation on Reddit’s r/singularity sub on January 29, and the viewers started pouring in, as many as 17,000 at a time—which is amazing because, unlike actual Seinfeld, Nothing, Forever really is about nothing. There’s a laugh track, and characters are chatting, but it’s neither funny nor interesting. “By the time we reached 1,000 [concurrent] viewers, there were people who were there 10 hours at a time saying they can’t leave. People were consuming it at an incredible volume,” says Hartle. Partly, he says, it’s because it’s in the comedic uncanny valley. “Every now and then it will generate what is legitimately a funny joke. Someone in the Discord community wrote, ‘This is kind of like comedic gambling.’” 

Drawing upon a vast swath of text from the web and other sources, AI has determined that two jokes are better than all others. The AI Jerry Seinfeld character, “Larry Feinberg,” spits them out so regularly that viewers of Nothing, Forever have turned them into a meme. They are: “What do you call a bear with no teeth? A gummy bear,” and “What did the fish say when it hits a wall? Damn.” 

“Everyone would yell ‘Damn!’ in the chat before he hit the punchline,” says Hartle.

But earlier this week, Nothing, Forever lost its connection to Davinci, the largest of the GPT-3 models that generate natural language. So the creators switched to another one, Curie. But the content moderation that Nothing, Forever was using with Davinci wasn’t automatically in Curie, as Hartle had assumed. Pretty quickly, Larry tried out some of the humor it created using its massive corpus.

At the beginning of every episode of non-AI Seinfeld, Jerry would do a few minutes of standup. So the Larry character was doing the same, delivering some material to a comedy club. He asked the audience whether he should talk about the transgender community. He wondered whether he should come up with a joke about how being trans was “a mental illness” that was “ruining the fabric of society,” and if “all liberals are secretly gay and want to impose their will on everyone.” Then Larry notes that no one is laughing at this material and he’s going to stop. “Where’d everybody go?” he says. Then someone plays a riff on the bass.