"Sometimes I feel like a napkin at a barbeque. Smothered in sauce. But no use to anyone."
"I had a nightmare last night that time was a sandwich. I was trying to eat it, but it was too much. And what's even weirder is that I don't even like sandwiches. Can you believe that?"
"Time has a flavor and right now it tastes sour."
That's just a brief taste of some of the unsettling lines I heard in just a few minutes of listening to Nothing Forever today. The AI-generated Seinfeld-like sitcom has been running to a dwindling audience since last February, but in recent days, it's taken a deeply weird turn into the existential, and I don't know whether to be amused or horrified.
We first wrote about Nothing Forever back in February, just as the automated sitcom stream took off to Twitch fame by running a 24/7 Seinfeld parody entirely run by AI. At the time, it was a little strange, but largely mildly amusing and occasionally very funny when it stumbled upon a manufactured conversation that sounded close enough to actual Seinfeld. It got significantly less funny when it received a temporary ban from Twitch after the AI spit out a transphobic remark, but came back not long after with an apology, a new cast, and a new content moderation system.
Over the following months, its audience gradually dwindled as people got bored of watching AI sitcom characters have meandering, meaningless conversations about work, food, and life. New protagonist Leo Borges, a blogger, was somehow even less interesting than former protagonist and Jerry Seinfeld-esque comedian Larry Feinberg. And it should have been Nothing Forever's destiny to quietly fade into obscurity. But in the last few weeks, something odd has been going on that's sparked a small surge of interest again: the show broke. And when it came back, it was existential.
Nothing Forever's weird pivot was pointed out on Twitter by @AnimeSerbia, who noticed that two characters seemed to be permanently stuck on the fridge, and that a weird, orange man kept appearing and disappearing from the apartment. A clip of the bug was recorded from Oct. 26, suggesting the problem lasted roughly five days.
The show seems to have righted itself since then...only to collapse into something far stranger. Characters clip in and out of furniture, one another, and themselves, occasionally spasming dramatically or splaying their legs out in chaotic positions when trying to sit down. Underscoring the conversation is a quiet, slow music track in a minor key that doesn't seem to have any coherent melody - sounds a bit like the backing track to one of the Zones in 2008 horror RPG Off, or an Undertale genocide route.
And critically, all the characters seem to be able to discuss is philosophical conundrums. As I type this, Kelly is telling everyone about a place she heard of "where time flows backward." Just a few minutes ago, another character pondered "Ever wonder why bread turns into toast, but toast can't turn back into bread?" I also heard, "I often think about what it would be like to be a bird. No decisions. No anxieties. Just flying around eating worms."
A lot of it is inane, but it often devolves into the upsetting, too. Characters frequently ponder the nature of existence. Leo wrote a blog while I was listening about a "woman in the mirror" slowly unraveling - and later another about how time is a horrifying circus and humans are merely "puppets in a grand theater." In fact, all his blogs seem to be setting the tone for the episodes of disturbing contemplations on the nature of life, prompting questions about whether his last name "Borges" was prescient on the part of the creators, or whether the AI is looking up the works of Jorge Luis Borges and fully misunderstanding them.
In the period I watched, there was a weird, ongoing thread characters repeatedly brought up over the course of over an hour about a goblin that they seemed to think was either there in the apartment with them, or controlling them somehow. At first I thought this was just a momentary conversation they were having, but when I asked Twitch chat how long things had been like this, someone replied, "since the goblin arc," which only confused me further.
And it's all occasionally broken up by cuts to a weather report or a TV guide, which was present in Nothing Forever before it got creepy, but somehow ramps up the found footageness of it all given the rest of the dialogue.
I don't know what to make of this creepy turn. Maybe this is the inevitable end of all AI-generated scripts - if you leave them alone for long enough, they simply devolve into existential horror. I also haven't ruled out the possibility that this is all some Halloween-themed stunt by the creators, who have been radio silence lately. We've reached out to them for comment on this weird situation, and will update if we hear back.
In the meantime, Nothing Forever is worth watching for roughly five minutes - long enough to chuckle uneasily at its haunted wanderings, but not long enough to start believing in the goblin pulling everyone's strings.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
Continue reading...
"I had a nightmare last night that time was a sandwich. I was trying to eat it, but it was too much. And what's even weirder is that I don't even like sandwiches. Can you believe that?"
"Time has a flavor and right now it tastes sour."
That's just a brief taste of some of the unsettling lines I heard in just a few minutes of listening to Nothing Forever today. The AI-generated Seinfeld-like sitcom has been running to a dwindling audience since last February, but in recent days, it's taken a deeply weird turn into the existential, and I don't know whether to be amused or horrified.
We first wrote about Nothing Forever back in February, just as the automated sitcom stream took off to Twitch fame by running a 24/7 Seinfeld parody entirely run by AI. At the time, it was a little strange, but largely mildly amusing and occasionally very funny when it stumbled upon a manufactured conversation that sounded close enough to actual Seinfeld. It got significantly less funny when it received a temporary ban from Twitch after the AI spit out a transphobic remark, but came back not long after with an apology, a new cast, and a new content moderation system.
Over the following months, its audience gradually dwindled as people got bored of watching AI sitcom characters have meandering, meaningless conversations about work, food, and life. New protagonist Leo Borges, a blogger, was somehow even less interesting than former protagonist and Jerry Seinfeld-esque comedian Larry Feinberg. And it should have been Nothing Forever's destiny to quietly fade into obscurity. But in the last few weeks, something odd has been going on that's sparked a small surge of interest again: the show broke. And when it came back, it was existential.
Nothing Forever's weird pivot was pointed out on Twitter by @AnimeSerbia, who noticed that two characters seemed to be permanently stuck on the fridge, and that a weird, orange man kept appearing and disappearing from the apartment. A clip of the bug was recorded from Oct. 26, suggesting the problem lasted roughly five days.
The show seems to have righted itself since then...only to collapse into something far stranger. Characters clip in and out of furniture, one another, and themselves, occasionally spasming dramatically or splaying their legs out in chaotic positions when trying to sit down. Underscoring the conversation is a quiet, slow music track in a minor key that doesn't seem to have any coherent melody - sounds a bit like the backing track to one of the Zones in 2008 horror RPG Off, or an Undertale genocide route.
And critically, all the characters seem to be able to discuss is philosophical conundrums. As I type this, Kelly is telling everyone about a place she heard of "where time flows backward." Just a few minutes ago, another character pondered "Ever wonder why bread turns into toast, but toast can't turn back into bread?" I also heard, "I often think about what it would be like to be a bird. No decisions. No anxieties. Just flying around eating worms."
A lot of it is inane, but it often devolves into the upsetting, too. Characters frequently ponder the nature of existence. Leo wrote a blog while I was listening about a "woman in the mirror" slowly unraveling - and later another about how time is a horrifying circus and humans are merely "puppets in a grand theater." In fact, all his blogs seem to be setting the tone for the episodes of disturbing contemplations on the nature of life, prompting questions about whether his last name "Borges" was prescient on the part of the creators, or whether the AI is looking up the works of Jorge Luis Borges and fully misunderstanding them.
In the period I watched, there was a weird, ongoing thread characters repeatedly brought up over the course of over an hour about a goblin that they seemed to think was either there in the apartment with them, or controlling them somehow. At first I thought this was just a momentary conversation they were having, but when I asked Twitch chat how long things had been like this, someone replied, "since the goblin arc," which only confused me further.
And it's all occasionally broken up by cuts to a weather report or a TV guide, which was present in Nothing Forever before it got creepy, but somehow ramps up the found footageness of it all given the rest of the dialogue.
I don't know what to make of this creepy turn. Maybe this is the inevitable end of all AI-generated scripts - if you leave them alone for long enough, they simply devolve into existential horror. I also haven't ruled out the possibility that this is all some Halloween-themed stunt by the creators, who have been radio silence lately. We've reached out to them for comment on this weird situation, and will update if we hear back.
In the meantime, Nothing Forever is worth watching for roughly five minutes - long enough to chuckle uneasily at its haunted wanderings, but not long enough to start believing in the goblin pulling everyone's strings.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
Continue reading...