Amazon’s Twitch Censors AI-Generated ‘Seinfeld’ Spoof for ‘Transphobic’ Jokes

Seinfeld parody
nothing, forever/Twitch

Twitch, the Amazon-owned livestreaming service popular with gamers, has suspended Nothing, Forever — an animated and AI-generated parody of Seinfeld for streaming a joke about how “transgender people are ruining the fabric of society.”

The segment which led to the livestream’s temporary suspension featured Larry Feinberg — the show’s primary character, a standup comic based on Jerry Seinfeld — considering jokes about “transgender” persons:

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. 

Google-owned YouTube has removed uploads of the segment, claiming the clips were “removed for violating YouTube’s Terms of Service.”

Leftist tech outlet the Verge described the AI-generated segment as “transphobic” and an example of “transphobia.” Vice similarly cast the clip as “transphobic” and “homophobic.”

Twitch’s page for Nothing, Forever currently states that the livestream is “temporarily unavailable due to a violation of Twitch’s Community Guidelines or Terms of Service.”

Nothing, Forever is created using OpenAI’s GPT-3 technology.

The livestream’s Discord channel features announcements from the show’s creators regarding the temporary suspension of their AI-generated and animated Seinfeld spoof. They blamed the Twitch suspension on “inappropriate text being generated” by the artificial intelligence tool upon which it is built.

The creators promised to apply “content moderation” tools included in OpenAI’s suite of tools. OpenAI, the research laboratory developing GPT-3 and other artificial intelligence technologies, received $1 billion from Microsoft in 2019. CNBC and Semafor reported in January that Microsoft was in talks with OpenAI to fund the laboratory with an additional $10 billion into the organization.

The livestream creators promised to apply OpenAI’s political censorship tools to prevent future generations of “inappropriate” content.

They wrote, “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.”

OpenAI’s tools have applied an absurd level of political bias to its popular ChatGPT chatbot.

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.

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