More Seinfeld Than Seinfeld Itself

Since the hit sitcom Seinfeld went off the air in 1998 after nine seasons, the show's devoted followers have long mused about an alternate reality: What if the original "show about nothing" had never ended? Now they've gotten what they wished for--well, sort of. In mid-December, a never-ending AI-generated reboot, aptly named Nothing, Forever, launched on the streaming platform Twitch. You could, anyway, until earlier this week, when forever abruptly ended--or was at least briefly interrupted, and in just about the most fitting way imaginable: by the AI scriptwriter devolving into bigotry. Nothing, Forever is powered by Davinci, the newest publicly available version of OpenAI's GPT-3 language model--a close relative of ChatGPT--and although that technology is impressive, the show, in most respects, is not.