A show created by an AI and broadcast live on Twitch has been blocked for transphobia

Every day on Twitch it is possible to watch many different contents: talkshows, videogames, esports, performances of various kinds and also very interesting experiments such as a television series created by an AI along the lines of Seinfeldcalled (not without irony) Nothing, forever. Why is “nothing that goes on forever”as stated in its description.

It read, because the show has recently undergone a 14-day broadcast freeze for sharing transphobic content.

What is Nothing, Forever

But let’s go in order, because we are not dealing with the classic story of a comedian who does not understand the time in which he lives and tries to reposition herself by playing the victim of political correctness or a children’s book author who suddenly turns out to be transphobic.

Nothing, forever is a show developed by Mismatch Media and created entirely exploiting basic machine learning technologies such as Dall-E, GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion which revolves around 4 characters vaguely inspired by Seinfeld, but only for the fact that they are 3 men and a woman talking about current events and because every show starts with a little bit of stand-up comedy.

The similarities stop here, because for the rest Nothing, forever is a show with rather boring texts with strange shots that show three-dimensional characters that seem to come out of a bad game for the first PlayStation. It is successful above all because it exists and is the product of more artificial intelligences, more than for its contents, even if on Twitch there is also the undeniable attraction of the here and now. The gags, whether they are good or bad, are in fact unrepeatable, unique moments of madness, embarrassment and involuntary comedywhich are no longer repeated: for this reason (and before the blockade), the average viewership was around 3,000 people, far more than the average streamer can hope to get.

However, viewers of Nothing, forever they will have to wait for the two week break that the channel had to suffer for posting transphobic content, clearly violating Twitch’s rules.

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twitter: the offending piece

What happened to Nothing, Forever

But how could this happen? To tell the truth, the strangeness is that it has only happened now, because almost all the AIs that have in some way drawn on the contents on the Net are quickly become repositories of racism, historical denial or worse.

In 2016, a Microsoft chatbot was corrupted by Twitter content and in less than 24 hours of activation it started chirping against minorities, women and in favor of Trump and there are many examples of machine learning that are somehow tainted by bias, because they are the same ones we face every day, only that AIs lack a social and moral context which acts as a parachute.

And so here’s a fine day Larry, one of the characters from Nothing, foreverdecides to start the stand-up moment with a series of comments against transgender people and how they destroy the fabric of society by putting a dig at liberal homosexuals who want to impose their will on the world. And at that point the ban was inevitable.

In an email sent to Kotaku magazinethe creator of Nothing, foreverSkyler Hartle, declared himself “very embarrassed” by the incident and explained that the situation would occur for a technical problem and obviously would not reflect the views of Mismatch Media in any way.

Usually sitcom lyrics are screened by a moderation system provided by OpenAI, which clearly didn’t work and which will probably be joined by a second system to avoid further slip-ups. More precisely, it seems that the GPT-3 module using for the show (called Da Vinci) has had some malfunctions and, to avoid interrupting transmissions, we have temporarily used the technicians Curie, a less evolved OpenAI module. Which is what generated the transphobic comments.