See Seinfeld Endless Episode Brought To Life With Terrifying AI
A Twitch user is streaming a seemingly never-ending AI-generated episode of Seinfeld on Twitch.
Did you love the sitcom Seinfeld so much that you wish it had never ended? Well, one Twitch streamer has kinda/sorta made that dream come through in a bizarre way. Twitch user watchmeforever is streaming a Seinfeld-like endless episode, with everything generated by artificial intelligence, as you can see below.
As you will learn if you watch the Seinfeld endless episode long enough, it isn’t exactly a recreation of the beloved sitcom. Rather than Jerry Seinfeld, the main character is Larry Feinberg. The animation makes us think of the classic Dire Straits music video for “Money for Nothing,” and the dialogue isn’t quite up to par.
The stream includes a laugh track, though judging by the lines that trigger it, it isn’t clear if it’s supposed to sound off at punchlines or just automatically after a certain number of lines. The endless Seinfeld episode seems to consist mostly of brief conversations about things like shops that just opened up. The scenes are bookended with exterior shots of the apartment building, Jerry‘s (or Larry’s) stand-up routine, and a recreation of the cable channel scrolling the broadcast schedule.
If nothing else, the Seinfeld endless episode serves as a good and perhaps hopeful reminder that regardless of fears sparked by fiction like Terminator and The Matrix, at the very least SkyNet is far from being able to threaten us in terms of human creativity. The stream is funny only in how incredibly un-funny it is, proving that while AI may be able to replicate the formula of sitcom humor delivery, it has yet to crack the code of delivering the actual humor.
It is interesting that 25 years after its finale, Seinfeld has become something of a go-to barometer on how malleable popular art and popular culture can be. Another example of online Seinfeld-centered media can be seen on TikTok, where the user seinpeaks uses clips from the sitcom but adds the alternatively moody, dread-inducing, and uplifting music of Twin Peaks. The result is a series of classic Seinfeld scenes that often feel more like actual drama, as you can see for yourself below.
@seinpeaks ♬ Laura Palmer’s Theme (Instrumental) – Angelo Badalamenti
It’s likely one of the reasons Seinfeld is being experimented with in so many interesting new ways is its arrival on Netflix in October 2021. With more people able to binge the sitcom whenever they want, its place in the cultural zeitgeist is that much more prevalent.
One person who is experiencing a very different kind of Seinfeld endless episode is Wayne Knight, who played Jerry’s scheming neighbor Newman. Back in 2015, the Jurassic Park star admitted that playing Jerry Seinfeld’s conniving mailman “practically obliterated” his film career. Knight said, “by being on something that iconic and being that known for that character, it made it much more difficult as a character actor to disappear into film.”
