back to article Twitch bans AI-generated Seinfeld show for making transphobic jokes

The Seinfeld spoof Nothing, Forever - a sitcom developed using generative AI - has been temporarily banned on Twitch after one of the characters accidentally spewed transphobic profanities. The bizarre show made headlines last week for using AI to improvise visuals and script of a never-ending episode of Seinfeld. In comedy …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Its in a way hilarious.

  2. Justin Pasher

    Is the intelligence really artificial?

    I'm kind of curious. As AI develops more and more, it seems like this content moderation and intervention ends up being used more and more often when things deemed inappropriate in some circles are generated. With people getting involved on that level, how artificially intelligent can AI actually be when it's being coaxed by humans? If we tell the AI "You can't say that", it slowly starts becoming more of a filtered model of reality, which will basically make it biased one way or another.

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: Is the intelligence really artificial?

      We're all filtered in some ways. Teaching is not just a process of giving you a bunch of stuff to put in your brain, but also pointing out the wrong stuff. A good teacher not only tells you how to solve a quadratic equation, but shows you why you can't prove something the way you just did and how to do it correctly. That's a factual correction, but it uses the same filtering system that telling a program not to say something does. You're not prevented from using the faulty proof in the future, but if you want to appear correct you'll remember and avoid making the same mistake.

      Regardless of your opinions on what we tell the programs not to say, removing undesirable output is not a limiting factor on the program's "intelligence" if we have a program we deem to be intelligent. Depending on what we choose to restrict, we could be reducing the program's independence, but I would question whether we want many independent programs (and even if you do, whether you want one that's entirely independent and could decide, to take the obvious sci-fi trope, that killing you is not filtered out so it's going to do it).

      1. Insert sadsack pun here

        Re: Is the intelligence really artificial?

        To be fair, plenty of 90s sitcoms had some pretty ugly homophobic and transphobic storylines. The AI Seinfeld storyline could easily have made it to air.

        1. doublelayer Silver badge

          Re: Is the intelligence really artificial?

          This doesn't matter that much to the point I made. Whether you filter the output based on a view you no longer think is valid, based on a view that you think is fine but others don't think is valid, or just to prevent it from spitting out any more of the stupid jokes mentioned in last week's article on this show, that's a filter which will change what you see but won't artificially limit the ability for the model to produce useful text on a topic you didn't filter out. You can argue with the settings someone put on the filter, but that's not relevant to the effects of filtering in general on models that produce text.

        2. Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch Silver badge

          Re: Is the intelligence really artificial?

          Not that there's anything wrong with tha... Oh.

        3. Frumious Bandersnatch

          Re: Is the intelligence really artificial?

          like "The Puerto Rico Day" or whatever they called it?

          (obviously not trans- or homo- phobic, but extremely dismissive of Puerto Ricans)

    2. LionelB Silver badge

      Re: Is the intelligence really artificial?

      > With people getting involved on that level, how artificially intelligent can AI actually be when it's being coaxed by humans?

      Artificial Intelligence. The clue is in the name. It is, by definition, designed by humans, never mind "coaxed".

    3. Orv Silver badge

      Re: Street signs

      It's not like AIs have some magical link to absolute truth, and we're censoring its truth bombs because it's too accurate. It's getting a filtered view of the world to begin with based on what's in its training sets. Training sets by their nature are often biased -- both by the cultural content they're extracted from and by what's conveniently available. Image recognition AIs hallucinate giraffes because people take more pictures of giraffes than they do of empty savanna. Facial recognition AIs can't tell black people apart because there aren't very many black people in their training sets.

      Besides, the fact that humor is contextual and there are things you don't say in polite company is as much a part of our world as anything else, and if AI is going to interact in human culture it needs to learn that, too.

  3. T. F. M. Reader

    Feature suggestion

    Do not moderate AI creations but make AI generate trigger warnings to place before whatever they generate and apologies to place right after.

    That may be hilarious in a way. Come to think of it the feature may also save organizations enormous amounts of money currently paid as salaries to people who generate trigger warnings and apologies. Of course that will also subvert the whole purpose of generating those trigger warnings and apologies in the first place. Hmm...

    1. sipke

      Re: Feature suggestion

      I'm not able to watch the offending segment. It was removed by yt.

      Did the characters at least say "not that there's anything wrong with that" after their offensive quips?

      1. vekkq

        Re: Feature suggestion

        full quote:

        > “I’m thinking about doing a bit about how being transgender is actually a mental illness. Or how all liberals are secretly gay and want to impose their will on everyone. Or something about how transgender people are ruining the fabric of society, but no one is laughing, so I’m going to stop. Thanks for coming out tonight. See you next time. Where’d everybody go.”

  4. Neil Barnes Silver badge
    Facepalm

    You can watch the bad stand-up scene below.

    Apparently not: the box currently states video removed for violating Youtube's policies.

    Er, remind me again why anyone thinks this sort of thing is a good idea?

    1. Insert sadsack pun here

      Re: You can watch the bad stand-up scene below.

      So you're saying...Down With This Sort Of Thing?

  5. macjules

    Remove the root cause

    If humans/upright monkeys/apes cause an AI to generate bad text then we should remove that genre of human/upright monkey/ape from the species.

    I, for one, welcome my GPT overlords.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Devil

    "Davinci model to a less powerful and cheaper version named Curie"

    Do they mean a female scientits is cheaper and less powerful than a male one - taking also into account that Curie made real science while Leonardo did mostly sci-fi. and became famous as a painter? We need to ban this kind of "intelligence".

    1. Phones Sheridan
      Coat

      Re: "Davinci model to a less powerful and cheaper version named Curie"

      "female scientits"

      What did you have on your mind while writing that comment? Or are you an AI and you've created a sentence based on the training data you have been provided with?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Continuous training

    Giving AI the authentic Human experience - ie realising that there are things you can't say and will be forced to unsay and never say again.

    Hmmm. Perhaps it's all about training an AI to be a single unpaid source of censorship, thus freeing up thousands of busybodies who will have to find some other activity to validate their existence.

  8. Al fazed
    Devil

    Well ?

    We are in the age of the Artificial Idiots, are we not ?

    Trust I read somewhere today in this news organ, is all that we need but will never manage to attain, is my spin on "the achievements of AI"

    Well done.............

    ALF

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I was having a conversation with a not-especially-technically-minded friend about ChatGPT and general AI things. I related the tale of Microsoft's AI chatbot Tay, which within a very short space of time had started to spout all manner of misogony and right wing opinions. My friends take on this was "so, they developed something that emulates the average bloke in a pub...did they get as far as a module which claims to have been in the SAS and was the 3rd man on the balcony in the Iranian embassy siege?"

  10. A. Coatsworth Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Well, it seems "forever" means "until someone gets triggered by a stupid joke.

    But wait, did anybody even claim to be triggered? This is starting to sound like the (apocryphal?) experiment of the monkeys, the bananas on a ladder and the jets of cold water.

    1. Orv Silver badge

      Eh. I don't think we want to set a precedent that you can be an asshole as long as you can claim it was the algorithm, not you.

      1. willfe

        Yeah, I'd prefer we emphasize the existing precedent that you can be an asshole *period*, regardless of whether someone else takes offense. I'm not joking. Outlawing "being a jerk" is not going to eliminate jerks. I *really* wish people could bend their minds enough to understand that.

        1. Orv Silver badge

          No one is talking about outlawing being a jerk, but too many jerks think no one should be allowed to impose any consequences for their behavior. Private platforms kicking you out for bad behavior is not the same thing as it being "outlawed." You're not entitled to an audience for your assholery.

  11. yetanotheraoc Silver badge

    Oh but it does

    "the generative content created in no way reflects the values or opinions of our staff"

    Amoral AI spouts random stuff that is deemed immoral, but "we didn't mean it". I think this falls under the category of: could have reasonably foreseen. Since their intent was to turn on the AI and see what happens, I think it reflects that the staff is amoral and/or naive, just like the AI.

    1. willfe

      Re: Oh but it does

      That's a very risky assumption, unless you want to also try to argue that Google's engineers are inherently [whatever]-ist because they had to scramble quickly to teach their image recognition AI that a black person was in fact *not* an ape or that Microsoft is filled with naht-sees because their AI bot "Tay" started quoting he-who-shall-not-be-named (not the orange one, but the other one he was compared to).

  12. Macs1000

    So, did nobody think it might be a good idea to check this stuff before it was actually aired?

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