Twitch’s first big artificially generated show Nothing, Forever is not the same anymore. Although it’s been running nonstop since December 2022, with just a handful of changes here and there, the Seinfeld-like broadcast almost broke late last week. Now, after getting fixed, it’s somehow even creepier than before.
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Created by the self-described “experimental lab” Mismatch Media, Nothing, Forever is a 24/7 livestream on Twitch. Powered by AI tools DALL-E, OpenAI ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and others, the show mimicked Larry David’s ‘90s sitcom Seinfeld eerily well. Its main character, Larry Feinberg, and side characters were all lookalikes of the IRL show’s cast, rendered in PS1-style graphics. The apartment they walked around in greatly resembled Jerry’s New York City residence. Hell, in between the “skits,” Larry would even perform a stand-up set to an off-screen crowd in the same way Jerry did on the show.
Nothing, Forever was basically AI Seinfeld, but as it was built with artificial intelligence, Larry was bound to get in trouble—and that he did. The AI running Larry generated a transphobic joke during one of his stand-up bits, leading to a temporary ban from Twitch in early February. The show was reinstated 14-days later, but with an entirely new cast of characters for what Mismatch Media dubbed Nothing, Forever: Season Two. Things haven’t been the same since.
AI Seinfeld’s downfall
Larry Feinberg is gone. In his place is the bespectacled blogger Leo Borges that still kinda-sorta looks like Jerry Seinfeld. The stand-up bits are gone and replaced with these soliloquies of Leo’s thoughts as he posts to his site, Borges’s Boredom Board. And the vibrant apartment is gone, with the characters now standing around and walking about the drabbest flat with the blandest decor. It’s been this way since March, but recently things got worse.
On October 27, Twitter user AnimeSerbia posted that the show’s characters “don’t even say anything anymore and just stand still in complete silence.” The poster followed up with another tweet about “a strange orange man” that silently stalked the apartment, disappearing and reappearing at random. As the days went on, the show’s AI gears continued to slowly fall apart until October 30, when 404 Media reporter Jason Koebler shared a video of two characters, Leo and Nick Sterling (called “brown man” by viewers for his brown suit), just…walking into each other. In front of a closed refrigerator. On a loop. For five days. Now, characters sit around a handful of the same sets, just kinda staring at each other, wordless. If they aren’t sitting, then they’re walking into each other, into walls, or in place. Sometimes their movements are erratic, with arms flailing and legs jerking.
Koebler reported that ardent fans eulogized the old Nothing, Forever on Discord after that loop. Some felt like the creators, Mismatch Media, abandoned the show, while others wondered if it will literally just continue to be nothing forever.
Nothing, Forever but make it creepy
Since breaking at the end of October, Nothing, Forever feels disjointed, like the pieces don’t totally fit together anymore.. Even now, as I type this, Leo has been typing on his computer for 10 minutes in silence after monologuing for a couple minutes about eternity and permanence. It’s extremely weird, made weirder by the eerily sparse music that soundtracks the entire thing. It’s like a lo-fi horror show.
It’s not just the bizarre movements—like hips spasming or necks twisting—or the uncomfortable quiet that’s occasionally broken by laugh tracks that makes Nothing, Forever: Season Two so strange. It’s also the conversations the characters have with each other—when they actually are having conversations. Before, the show discussed eating fruit or cooking eggs. Frivolous stuff. Now, the characters go on long tangents about the nature of existence, if a refrigerator has consciousness, how they’re trapped in a simulation, and, of course, aliens. They still occasionally have more light-hearted conversations (the characters recently debated the best color and food to eat on each day), but they always return to existential dread. In this way, Nothing, Forever would make for a solid Halloween watch.
Fittingly, the official Discord server feels like a ghost town. Folks don’t post nearly as often as they used to. When they do, they lament the new Nothing, Forever while pinging the creators (who haven’t posted in the Discord since April) for updates on fixes to the frequent loops. Most posts are an image from the show’s first season depicting a lone mic stand, an apt metaphor.
Kotaku reached out to Mismatch Media for comment.
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It’s difficult to say what’s really happening here. Is Mismatch Media tinkering with the artificial intelligence tools in the background to cause the eeriness, or is machine-learning technology reaching its limit insofar as generating a never-ending livestream? AI is just a repository of human-created media that reshapes and regurgitates it back to us, after all, so maybe it’s both. One thing is for sure, though: Nothing, Forever is simply not what it used to be.
