Skyler hartle
Author: m | 2025-04-25
Skyler Hartle’s Post Skyler Hartle Senior Manager, Product @ Microsoft Azure
@skylerhartle.bsky.social - Skyler Hartle
Nothing, Forever, an AI-powered Seinfeld spoof show on Twitch, was quickly becoming the next big thing on the platform. During the always-on stream, a cast of Seinfeld-adjacent characters had befuddling conversations, made weird jokes, and moved through a world of crude, blocky graphics, all backed by a laugh track and directed by AI.But then it was suspended for two weeks after the Jerry Seinfeld-like character made transphobic remarks. That suspension is set to lift on Monday, and while its creators at Mismatch Media have been working to make sure transphobic comments won’t happen again, they can’t guarantee it.The transphobic remarks happened after Mismatch changed the AI models underpinning the stream. “We started having an outage using OpenAI’s GPT-3 Davinci model, which caused the show to exhibit errant behaviors,” according to an announcement in the Nothing, Forever Discord. “OpenAI has a less sophisticated model, Curie, that was the predecessor to Davinci. When Davinci started failing, we switched over to Curie to try to keep the show running without any downtime. The switch to Curie was what resulted in the inappropriate text being generated.”In a later post, Mismatch added that “we mistakenly believed that we were leveraging OpenAI’s content moderation system for their text generation models” and that it would be working to implement OpenAI’s content moderation API before the show went live again.“Of course, with software, there’s always variability”Since then, Mismatch has been doing stability testing against that implementation and making sure there aren’t any false negatives, Mismatch co-founder Skyler Hartle said in an interview with The Verge. “So far, it looks really good,” he said. But then, he hedged, saying that “of course, with software, there’s always variability.” I asked Hartle how Mismatch makes sure its guardrails work. “I think that in the space of generative AI and generative media, there is an inherent uncertainty.”He referenced many of the wild things people have already been able to get ChatGPT and the new Bing AI chatbot to say: “I think everybody in this space needs to be worried and thinking about this.” Mismatch Media is tackling this by making an AI “safety council slash team,” Hartle said, which is trying to figure out mitigation strategies so that AI safety measures can evolve alongside generative AI pieces. “We feel very strongly that it’s our duty as people in the generative space to do this as safely as possible.”In addition to leveraging the official OpenAI content moderation API, Mismatch also wants to use OpenAI to assist in the moderation process. “We are working to create guardrails that actually leverage OpenAI to pass our content to them and ask a series of questions and prompts,” Hartle said. Mismatch is “figuring out the right ways to have OpenAI and these large language models help moderate this process. These models are the best thing at parsing natural language right now, so it makes a lot of sense to also try to use them as a secondary system.”Hartle doesn’t expect the tone of Nothing, Forever to change Skyler Hartle’s Post Skyler Hartle Senior Manager, Product @ Microsoft Azure By designers Skyler Hartle and Brian Habersberger for Mismatch Media, this AI SpongeBob show doesn’t appear to have any public owner or anyone who has claimed the channel as their own. As such, it’s technically possible that the thing isn’t actually being generated exclusively by an artificial intelligence, though if not, it sure manages to capture the feel of AI art.“Nothing, Forever” attracted a large amount of attention when it debuted in December 2022, with thousands of viewers tuning into the livestream; it also spawned a few similar shows, like the 24/7 AI-generated anime “Always Break Time”.At the same time, “Nothing, Forever” raised concerns about how AI programs affect real-life writers, and whether its “Seinfeld” parody infringes on copyright. After returning from its Twitch ban earlier this month, the show notably has rebooted slightly, removing many of the “Seinfeld” trappings that gave it its initial publicity. ai_sponge, at least right now, likely isn’t big enough to attract real legal action from Nickelodeon — though the network would almost certainly not be a fan of a “SpongeBob” parody where the main character and Patrick talk about having sex with each other.You can watch ai_sponge here, when it streams.Best of IndieWireSign up for Indiewire's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.Comments
Nothing, Forever, an AI-powered Seinfeld spoof show on Twitch, was quickly becoming the next big thing on the platform. During the always-on stream, a cast of Seinfeld-adjacent characters had befuddling conversations, made weird jokes, and moved through a world of crude, blocky graphics, all backed by a laugh track and directed by AI.But then it was suspended for two weeks after the Jerry Seinfeld-like character made transphobic remarks. That suspension is set to lift on Monday, and while its creators at Mismatch Media have been working to make sure transphobic comments won’t happen again, they can’t guarantee it.The transphobic remarks happened after Mismatch changed the AI models underpinning the stream. “We started having an outage using OpenAI’s GPT-3 Davinci model, which caused the show to exhibit errant behaviors,” according to an announcement in the Nothing, Forever Discord. “OpenAI has a less sophisticated model, Curie, that was the predecessor to Davinci. When Davinci started failing, we switched over to Curie to try to keep the show running without any downtime. The switch to Curie was what resulted in the inappropriate text being generated.”In a later post, Mismatch added that “we mistakenly believed that we were leveraging OpenAI’s content moderation system for their text generation models” and that it would be working to implement OpenAI’s content moderation API before the show went live again.“Of course, with software, there’s always variability”Since then, Mismatch has been doing stability testing against that implementation and making sure there aren’t any false negatives, Mismatch co-founder Skyler Hartle said in an interview with The Verge. “So far, it looks really good,” he said. But then, he hedged, saying that “of course, with software, there’s always variability.” I asked Hartle how Mismatch makes sure its guardrails work. “I think that in the space of generative AI and generative media, there is an inherent uncertainty.”He referenced many of the wild things people have already been able to get ChatGPT and the new Bing AI chatbot to say: “I think everybody in this space needs to be worried and thinking about this.” Mismatch Media is tackling this by making an AI “safety council slash team,” Hartle said, which is trying to figure out mitigation strategies so that AI safety measures can evolve alongside generative AI pieces. “We feel very strongly that it’s our duty as people in the generative space to do this as safely as possible.”In addition to leveraging the official OpenAI content moderation API, Mismatch also wants to use OpenAI to assist in the moderation process. “We are working to create guardrails that actually leverage OpenAI to pass our content to them and ask a series of questions and prompts,” Hartle said. Mismatch is “figuring out the right ways to have OpenAI and these large language models help moderate this process. These models are the best thing at parsing natural language right now, so it makes a lot of sense to also try to use them as a secondary system.”Hartle doesn’t expect the tone of Nothing, Forever to change
2025-04-16By designers Skyler Hartle and Brian Habersberger for Mismatch Media, this AI SpongeBob show doesn’t appear to have any public owner or anyone who has claimed the channel as their own. As such, it’s technically possible that the thing isn’t actually being generated exclusively by an artificial intelligence, though if not, it sure manages to capture the feel of AI art.“Nothing, Forever” attracted a large amount of attention when it debuted in December 2022, with thousands of viewers tuning into the livestream; it also spawned a few similar shows, like the 24/7 AI-generated anime “Always Break Time”.At the same time, “Nothing, Forever” raised concerns about how AI programs affect real-life writers, and whether its “Seinfeld” parody infringes on copyright. After returning from its Twitch ban earlier this month, the show notably has rebooted slightly, removing many of the “Seinfeld” trappings that gave it its initial publicity. ai_sponge, at least right now, likely isn’t big enough to attract real legal action from Nickelodeon — though the network would almost certainly not be a fan of a “SpongeBob” parody where the main character and Patrick talk about having sex with each other.You can watch ai_sponge here, when it streams.Best of IndieWireSign up for Indiewire's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
2025-04-20“So, I was at the store the other day, and as I’m checking out, the cashier asks me if I have any coupons, and I say, ‘No coupon problem!’” recalls a pixelated, barely three-dimensional figure that vaguely resembles Jerry Seinfeld. “So I’m walking down the street, and this guy comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ and I say, ‘It’s going coupon!’”An automated laugh track plays, but the joke doesn’t make sense. Then again, it doesn’t have to make sense.“Nothing, Forever” is a never-ending, AI-generated spoof of “Seinfeld,” the show about nothing. It’s been streaming on Twitch since December, and until a few days ago, the stream had an average of about four concurrent viewers. Now, at the moment I write this, there are 15,097 people watching a group of badly animated friends — Larry Feinberg, Fred Kastopolous, Yvonne Torres and Zoltan Kalker — cycling through infinite “Seinfeld”-like scenes with very little plot.The show has been streaming almost non-stop on Twitch since December, but it only reached a wider audience this week, when its creators slowly started promoting the stream on Reddit. Now, “Nothing, Forever” has more than 98,000 followers on Twitch, and a Discord channel with about 6,000 members.Behind the project are Skyler Hartle, a senior product manager at Microsoft, and Brian Habersberger, a polymer physicist. They call themselves Mismatch Media, though this venture remains a side project.Aptly, the duo met online while playing “Team Fortress 2” and they kept in touch over time. Four years ago, they started working on creative projects together.Image Credits: Nothing, Forever (opens in a new window)“It kind of started its journey as a kind of art project that Brian approached me with, and we ended up collaborating and working on it together and iterating on it over the last four
2025-04-06With the additional content moderation systems. That likely means we’ll continue to see the show keep creating more bizarre and irreverent moments, but hopefully this time, there’s no transphobia.Hartle wants to introduce an audience interaction systemHartle also said that Mismatch wants to introduce an audience interaction system that it had previously built but decided not to launch with Nothing, Forever. The system “allows fans to safely interact with the show and potentially massage the direction that the show heads in while still retaining its generative spirit,” according to Hartle. Mismatch hopes to launch the system alongside the lift of the Twitch suspension, but he doesn’t “want to promise anything at this point.”I’m personally skeptical of an audience interaction tool in an application like this. While it could be used in a grand moment of internet unity like the heyday of TwitchPlaysPokemon, I’m worried that it will turn into something like the Tay fiasco. Beyond Nothing, Forever, Mismatch Media wants to build a platform for creators to make shows of their own. “There’s a lot that goes into that, and a lot that we’re figuring out and iterating on, but the plan is to empower, like the next generation of people to do these kinds of things,” Hartle said. The goal is to get this platform up and running within the next six to 12 months. I also asked Hartle something I’ve been wondering since I first watched the show: is the plan actually to make it run forever? “Our hope is to run the show for as long as we can as long as it economically makes sense to do so because it is very expensive,” Hartle said. “But that said, we are building this out as a technology platform. And we want to make more of the shows. If we’re successful at that, and we’re able to build a business up around us, I see no reason why Nothing, Forever shouldn’t run as long as the fans and community want it to run.”
2025-03-29Who are we and why are we making Kinorium... Premieres Theaters Online Coming Soon Theaters • Online All Titles Advanced Search Collections Top 500 Film Awards Recommendations Movies • TV Shows Search by Name TV Shows Popular Top 500 My TV Shows My Calendar Coming Soon Premieres • Feed Friends Discover Blogs News Videos Trailers Reviews Cry of Fear, 2013 Movie Cast & Crew Videos Stills Facts Awards Premieres Technical Data Related Links Movie's ratings Friends — Kinorium — IMDb 7.8 174 Critics— Movie Cast & Crew Videos Stills Facts Awards Premieres Technical Data Related Links (2013) Country Sweden Spoken Language swedish, english Runtime 3 hr 23 min Budget $999 Premiere: World April 25, 2013 Premiere: USA April 25, 2013 Production Companies 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Horror Сast and Crew Stars Chace Crawford Mike Brandon Hemmings Simon Holland Roden Lydia Full Cast Director Skyler Harris Camera Skyler Harris Writer Skyler Harris Composer Skyler Harris Producer Skyler Harris All Crew Director Skyler Harris Camera Skyler Harris Writer Skyler Harris Composer Skyler Harris Producer Skyler Harris Editor Skyler Harris Related Movies There are no related titles yet, but you can add them: Add a short review 280 characters Or write an article... Sign up and you will see here friends impressions of the movie. Movies by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment 4.4 Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings 2011 5.7 In the Blood 2013 4.1 Wrong Turn 5 2012 4.8 Mirrors 2 2010 4.4 Tooth Fairy 2 2012 4.9 Marley & Me:
2025-04-10Years,” Hartle told TechCrunch. “The show we’re creating is really cool, and scratches that creative itch as just a surreal, fun kind of project, but we saw the merit of generative technology as a tool for broad-scale content creation and generation.”To make “Nothing, Forever,” Hartle and Habersberger use various AI models to generate text, speech and movements. The “script” of the show comes from an OpenAI GPT-3 model, Davinci. To voice the characters, they use the Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services speech API, and the visuals are made on the Unity game engine.“The Unity engine just does a lot of interpretation to basically run the show and inherit all this content, and the voices, and all these kinds of other pieces of direction from what we call ‘the director’ in the cloud,” Hartle said. “And the director dictates what happens on the show from a generative perspective.”They set out to create a surrealist, never-ending television show, and it simply made sense to base it on “Seinfeld,” a show that has defined the structure of a sitcom.“A sitcom has a laugh track and a sort of formulaic structure,” Habersberger told TechCrunch. “So when characters are saying things that don’t quite make sense, but the structure is one that you’re very familiar with, it really helps you to interpret and make sense of it, even though the sense isn’t there.”AI dialogue can get repetitive. Characters are constantly referencing new restaurants and stores to the point that it’s become an in-joke. On a fan-made “Nothing, Forever” bingo generator, the free space is “New thing!”Per the nascent wiki, some new places include a new type of bagel (it’s shaped like an octopus, and called the octobagel), a new shake shop (they serve pickles in their shakes), a new taco truck (they sell tacos and burgers)
2025-04-08