An automated YouTube stream that broadcasts AI-generated Family Guy “episodes” based on user-submitted pitches was recently broken and made unwatchable after someone realized they could make the characters scream gibberish endlessly using a few specific commands.

AI Peter is a stream that started in June 2023. The strange broadcast uses 3D models of Family Guy characters and locations to create new mini-episodes and scenarios featuring folks like Peter Griffin, Stewie, Lois, Meg, Quagmire, Joel, and many others. However, similar to the AI-generated Seinfeld stream on Twitch, their conversations aren’t based on a script written by a human, but instead use AI-generated text and speech tools to produce an endless amount of content. Here, though, users can submit ideas and episode pitches to the stream. And based on what I’ve seen, moderation seems to be light. As you might expect, this stream isn’t officially endorsed by Fox. And letting users submit ideas means people can break the AI characters in weird ways, which is what happened in a viral clip recently posted on Twitter.

On March 25, Twitter user abcdent shared a clip from a “few months ago” in which they were able to make Brian Griffin—the family’s talking dog—scream and babble incoherently over and over again while another character listed off bacterial infections. According to abcdent, this ended up making the stream mostly unwatchable and led to many users closing it.

“After three minutes the chat was begging the host to skip it but it’s all automated, it just kept going,” said abcdent on Twitter.

Abcdent shared more clips in which they spent a few dollars to suggest other prompts for the AI Family Guy stream which led to similar results. One of my “favorite” clips involves a character listing off famous, large industrial accidents between bouts of Brian yelling incoherently and Chris Griffin—the teenage son—screaming.

According to the AI Peter wiki, making characters scream and shout endless nonsense—often at a high volume—has become a common occurrence. What’s happening, as explained by the wiki, is that the AI-generation models used by the stream are “hallucinating” language when given specific characters like an asterisk. This leads to the odd, haunting screams and gargles you hear from Brian and other Family Guy characters whenever someone asks them to say “*” or “;”.

Apparently, at one point the stream’s community had a small Discord war over these types of annoying prompts. But the community quickly devolved into annoying and bullying each other rather than coming to a clear decision, and so it seems you can still break the stream by making characters yell for five minutes. That all tracks for a Family Guy-themed AI-generated content community.

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