Artificial intelligence's take on a classic sitcom is more than a load of "yada yada yada." "Nothing, Forever" is an AI-generated, "Seinfeld" like show on streaming platform Twitch that's set to never stop broadcasting. The 24/7 show, which has been streaming since December, has grown in popularity over the past week as thousands have tuned in to watch the adventures of animated characters Larry Feinberg, Fred Kastopolous, Yvonne Torres and Zoltan Kalker. As of Saturday morning, "Nothing, Forever" had over 131,000 Twitch followers. The show plays out in a similar fashion to the TV classic: It includes stand-up sequences, laugh tracks and conversations among AI friends similar to Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer inside of an apartment.

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.

"So, I was at the store the other day, and as I'm checking out, the cashier asks me if I have any coupons, and I say, 'No coupon problem!'" recalls a pixelated, barely three-dimensional figure that vaguely resembles Jerry Seinfeld. "So I'm walking down the street, and this guy comes up to me and says, 'Hey, how's it going?' and I say, 'It's going coupon!'" An automated laugh track plays, but the joke doesn't make sense. Then again, it doesn't have to make sense. "Nothing, Forever" is a never-ending, AI-generated spoof of "Seinfeld," the show about nothing.

There's always something to watch on Twitch, whether that's your fave musicians talking about video games or your fave streamers discussing politics. Now your choices include an absurd, often nonsensical Seinfeld-like show that runs 24/7/365 and is generated on the fly using artificial intelligence. Welcome to the future of TV, maybe? So-called AI has been a fraught topic lately. The technology, which typically uses machine learning to generate text, images, and even video from preexisting sets of data, is suddenly everywhere: art, article and essay writing, even video games.