No Big Deal: A Boring AI-Generated Sitcom

As you will no doubt be aware, one Anthropic researcher claimed there is a greater than one in 10 chance that AI will end all of humanity as we know it within the next decade. However, now that I’ve given it some thought, I think this statistic might actually be a little conservative. This is because I have just watched an episode of a sitcom created by AI, and if I ever have to do it again I’m genuinely going to die of boredom.

The show is No Big Deal, and it premiered on YouTube on Friday. I was apparently only the 376th person to watch it. This is by no means a recommendation that you become the 377th, more a warning to avoid it if your algorithm ever decides it hates you enough to suggest this.

No Big Deal bills itself as “The Office meets Dragons’ Den”, in that it is a workplace comedy about a group of angel investors who have to listen to various product pitches. In the first episode, the products include a toilet that analyses your poo and a sofa you can have sex on. The investors are nightmarish waxworks who speak with all the nuance and cadence of a satnav telling you that you just missed a turning.

If you’ve watched any AI-generated content recently, you’ll know the faults it has, and they are all present here. Shot-to-shot continuity is essentially nonexistent, with characters changing positions every time the camera cuts to a new angle. Background noise either is or isn’t there, seemingly on a whim. The characters – who all fitfully look enough like real-life actors to make the whole thing seem icky and exploitative – move around with not a trace of life behind their eyes. It remains completely impossible to care about anyone once you know they’ve been made by AI.

Perhaps the most depressing thing about No Big Deal is the fact that it was purportedly written by a human. Although all the characters, locations and scenes were churned out by a machine, the show was apparently written by Andrew Dickinson. Dickinson, once himself an angel investor, originally intended for the show to be made as a traditional television production. When he realised that this would be slow and expensive, he turned to AI.

To some degree, this makes sense. It is extraordinarily hard to get a television programme on the air. You can spend years grinding away on an idea, only to see it wither up and die when none of the eight commissioners currently working like the sound of it. Wouldn’t it be better to just seize control of the means of production and make the AI version?

On this evidence, absolutely not. This is not a funny show. It’s one-note and bawdy, and none of the jokes land. It seems as though, by rushing straight to AI, Dickinson has bypassed the development process that actually makes something good. You could cast the greatest human actors of their generation to perform this script and it would still be unwatchable.

Then again, even if by some miracle Dickinson had written the most hilarious sitcom of all time, it still would have turned to ash the moment he let it loose on these AI abominations. I really cannot overstate how terrible this thing is to look at. While the technology has improved to an extent that, should you pause a scene at just the right moment, the characters are photorealistic, there’s something truly deathly about watching them move.

Their lips don’t line up with dialogue. There’s a creepy smoothness to their movements. Sometimes, when they don’t have anything to do in a scene, they just sit there completely still like a powered-down robot. Their voices bark on monotonously like Siri reading out a pasta recipe. Even something as simple as a fist shake (a fist shake! In a sitcom! In 2026!) gets mauled beyond all recognition here, causing the shaker to judder and glitch as if they just stepped on an uninsulated wire.

The most tragic thing of all is that nobody involved can see that this is just a stepping stone to the endgame. Dickinson thinks he can get away without human actors or crew, but we are a nanosecond away from the technology deciding that it doesn’t need human writers, either. By capitulating even a jot to AI-created content, all Dickinson is doing is nudging himself further towards extinction.

And me, too, because if this is the future of entertainment then I’d rather die than write about it. If we really do only have a decade left, every second should be precious. Please don’t spend any of it watching crap like this.