AI Seinfeld Becomes Transphobic, Gets Banned From Twitch

Every few months, streaming service Twitch gets a new phenomenon. In early 2023, this coincided with another rising trend: artificial intelligence (AI). A page called 'watchmeforever' was producing endless scenes of AI-generated Seinfeld episodes, with crude, PS1-esque visuals. I use "was," because the Twitch stream, as well as the page itself, just disappeared.

Seinfeld and friends were being a little silly and goofy, spewing complete nonsense for a while. It's possible for the AI to make more or less sense at any given time. After a while, however, the speech patterns got their wires crossed. That's when Larry, the stand-in for Jerry on the real show, started producing actual hate speech rhetoric. In the stand-up routine scene, the Larry AI proclaims:

I'm thinking about doing a bit about how being transgender is actually a mental illness."

 

More hate speech follows after that, but you get the idea. The pattern follows that of any AI that's left to fend for itself. In 2016, a Microsoft AI Twitter bot started saying things like "Hitler was right," before promptly getting canned.

Unsurprisingly, a few minutes after that, the stream froze, after being on for around 32 consecutive hours. Links to the video clips people made no longer appeared. More importantly, the channel was also gone.

However, that's not before the page's chat, like a lot of chat spaces, devolved into complete chaos. The "it's just a joke" squad escalated to hate speech almost immediately, which has since moved over to the channel's Discord server. More than likely, the Twitch page was banned to prevent more hate speech, rather than the AI malfunction, if we were to speculate. The creators have notified people on their Discord server that Twitch has issued them when a 14-day ban, "due to what Larry Feinberg said tonight." An appeal was issued.
 

For now, it looks like the usual laissez-faire AI model will continue to fall to xenophobia time and again. I dunno, seems bad? There's a Kramer joke in there somewhere, but let's maybe just not go there. Hopefully, AI Seinfeld will return better, and with better convictions, than ever.
 

Daav Valentaten (@DaavPuke)
Editor-In-Chief, NoobFeed