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Raphael Thys
Image: Nothing, Forever / Twitch
Transphobia ruins everything, from your favorite wizarding franchise to, now, your favorite AI show about nothing. Nothing, Forever, the 24/7/365 AI-generated Seinfeld spoof that has exploded in popularity on Twitch, is going dark for two weeks, as the channel’s been hit with a suspension. As reported by Vice, the suspension stems from Larry (totally not Jerry), making transphobic remarks in his standup routine, wondering aloud if trans people are mentally ill and are ruining the fabric of society.
In a statement to The Verge, Skyler Hartle, co-creator of Nothing, Forever, wrote, “We are embarrassed, and this doesn’t reflect our values or opinions at all. This was the result of a mistake on our side that resulted in a technical issue.”
In the Nothing, Forever Discord channel, the team posted an announcement further elaborating on the ban, why it happened, and highlighted the steps they’re taking to ensure something like that never happens again. Basically, the program off which Nothing, Forever is run was experiencing technical difficulties, so the creators switched it to another similar program that did not have the same moderation fail-safes as the original, which allowed transphobic content to seep in.
“We mistakenly believed that we were leveraging OpenAI’s content moderation system for their text generation models,” the Discord announcement read. “We are working now to implement OpenAI’s content moderation API (it’s a tool we can use to verify the safeness of the content) before we go live again, and investigating secondary content moderation systems as redundancies.”