I came across a livestream called Nothing Forever1 which is a weird never ending fever dream of a pixelated, AI generated version of Seinfeld. Interestingly enough one of the things I was playing around with on ChatGPT2 myself was Seinfeld scripts as well.
I’m not sure what it is, but there is something about Seinfeld that seems to make it a good candidate for chucking at an AI. Maybe it’s just a latent memory of the ‘Modern Seinfeld’ twitter bot of ages ago?
Anyway, I decided to try to get ChatGPT to write a proper Seinfeld script, but let it do almost all of the work and to see how well it would turn out. So how did it turn out? Well, it’s artless, cold, artificial, eerie and creepy, but all in all… I don’t hate it?
It certainly helps that I can hear these character’s voice in my head, but there’s definitely places where it feels like Seinfeld.
To generate this script I had ChatGPT generate a few pitches for Seinfeld episodes and I picked my favourite out of all of them. Then I had it generate an outline based on its own pitch. It wrote an outline and separated it into four cts on its own. For every act I had it generated a script, it doesn’t tend to create enough content if you tell it to generate a whole script, and then I had it generate a few missing scenes it had described in its outline, but not actually written.
There are really only two ’editorial’ changes I made, the first one is that I asked it to generate an opening scene that would set up the premise a bit more by having Elaine introduce the idea of Reverse Psychology and I also cut the original ending, which was an entirely pointless scene where the gang sat around laughing and reflecting in a terribly out-of-character way and I had it instead write the current ending where George is reminded Elaine gave them the idea in the first place and they end up fighting.
The second one is probably the biggest nudge, but everything else, including the actual content of those two scenes is just ChatGPT. I think I’m going to try to create a full episode later and use a little more, but still minimal, nudging to see if I can get it any better without doing any actual manual rewriting.
Anyway here it is: and AI generated episode of Seinfeld called “The Reverse Psychology” or as I’m calling it Sainfeld. Get it, Sainfeld. Like Seinfeld but with AI. And people are worried about the effect of AI on art, let AI try to come up with a masterpiece like that! At least puns, the highest form of Art, are still safe from automation.