The AI 'Seinfeld' show loop broke but it's still alive

An AI-rendition of Seinfeld has been playing on an infinite loop on Twitch since December 2022, confounding the internet in more ways than one. But it seemed to have broken, almost forever, yesterday.

Nothing, Forever, launched by generative media lab Mismatch Media and created primarily via OpenAI, seemed to glitch for a few days. Fans and viewers took to X, pointing out both the low viewership on the Twitch channel and the fact that the digital characters were shown standing silently.

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404Media's Jason Koebler wrote that the show "is very broken, stuck on a short, repeating loop for days."

However, the show appears to have resumed, finding a flow and somewhat of a plot again. The Twitch channel has very few viewers though, oscillating between 40 and 70 people at most given times. The channel, entitled "WatchMeForever", has around 170,000 followers. At its peak popularity, nearly 20,000 people were tuned in at once.

Nothing, Forever previously faced a lapse back in March, when its Jerry Seinfeld-like character made a transphobic comment. It received a two-week ban from Twitch, making a comeback with new guardrails in place, according to the Mismatch Media creators. When it made its return, the characters were entirely replaced with non-Seinfeld characters — the ensemble now consists of Manfred, Kelly, Nick, and Leo – with little explanation.

As I was watching, it does seem like the series is taking an eerily meta, existential turn. From its genesis, the protagonists of the series were highly-pixelated and distinctively robotic. Their conversations, at the time of writing this article, only heightened this Black Mirror-esque endeavour.

The characters talk about past lives, the illusion of time, feeling of dread, and being forcibly stagnant. "Guys, does anyone else feel like we're stuck in a loop?", one character asks. "We need to get out of this diner," another says, eating at a table likely resembling the original Seinfeld restaurant. Later, another character talks about the vast nothingness of existence. "Reality is malleable like a dream," he writes on a computer. An ominous hum is in the background throughout.

"The utter chaos of this," says one. "It's beyond comprehension. The point is, this conversation makes absolutely no sense."