On YouTube and Twitch, parodies produced by artificial intelligence and streamed are multiplying. Among them, a caustic version of the famous cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants.
Mainly on Twitch and YouTube, a new trend is emerging. Creators stream parodies of TV shows or cartoons. The dialogues, the image and the voices are (often) produced thanks to AI, which automates for long hours. An automation of the online caricature which seems to become a phenomenon in its own right on the web, at the picture of memes.
One of the most shared streams on Twitter lately is “ Spongebob AI version “. A parody of the famous Nickelodeon cartoon as crazy as it is scary. SpongeBob square, Patrick the starfish, Sandy the squirrel and their friends discuss underwater with one difference: they appear under the influence of a hard drug. The episodes are composed of mini-scenes of a few tens of seconds interspersed with the temporal transition gag “ a few moments later. »
Spongebob caustic version, with many bugs
The majority of the dialogues take place between Bob and Patrick who discuss current affairs, intimate problems, and even taking drugs. Although quite simple, the sets take up the main places of the cartoon. The majority of the dialogue takes place on the main street of Bikini Bottom or in Mr. Krabs’ Crispy Crab restaurant.
The parody streamed on Twitch And Youtube seems to have been broadcast at least since March 2023. However, there is no evidence that the entire cartoon is generated by means of artificial intelligence, since nothing is explained about the process used. The 3D rendering is overall clean with few visual inconsistencies, though the graphics are dated. On the other hand, the movements of the characters are often jerky, close to those of a poorly developed video game.
In the background, secondary characters are often bugged, walking against objects or running in circles. Forced situation comedy or screenplay bug, a car boat seems to rush the characters regularly in the episodes.
On the dialogue side, the texts produced are (quite often) coherent but sometimes seem straight out of GPT. In some episodes, characters give advice or definitions in the same linguistic style as OpenAI’s language model. Sometimes, Patrick seems to be the victim of a stroke, his dialogue being reduced to totally incoherent onomatopoeias such as ” aasddskfkjdfsjfdshqs. “A bug which contributes very largely to the burlesque and absurd nature of the scene.
Very frequent skids
On Twitter, the many wacky scenes of ” AI Generated Sponge! ” are shared in mass. By their nature, some dialogues seem to have completely escaped the generator’s security filters (if any exist with the system behind that chain).
Some episodes of the parody appear inspired by topics present in the stream’s chat. Impossible to affirm with certainty this hypothesis, but the many slippages, sometimes childish or even downright illegal, of the characters could then easily be explained. In March, the show’s Twitch channel was deleted for several days before reappearing. Again, it’s impossible to know who’s behind it or if the AI is really being used, although it seems unlikely that someone is dialing it all in manually.
A real phenomenon
” AI Generated Sponge! is not the only production supposedly generated thanks to artificial intelligence. In recent months, many self-produced parodies have appeared on the platforms. This is the case of ” Nothing, Forever » streamed (at the time) on Twitch, parodying the series Seinfeld from 1989.
To work, the system generated the dialogs using the GPT-3 model ofOpen AI. The text was then transcribed vocally by a voice synthesizer and edited with synthetic images before being broadcast 24 hours a day.
In the field of audiovisual creation, AI seems to inspire a growing number of producers. Episode 4 of season 26 of South Park, broadcast on Paramount+ in France, makes direct reference to ChatGPT. (the end of the episode was entirely written by the AI, its creators even left script errors) A phenomenal advance in technology that excites as much as it worries. In April, many Hollywood screenwriters went on strike, in particular to fight against the increasing arrival of generative AI tools in their sector.
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