Anime Herald

Disastrously Not Knowing What to Do: The Life and Death of Always Breaktime

Added 2024-05-02 02:55:37 +0000 UTC

Author: Borealis Capps
Editor: Samantha Ferreira

The first AI-generated “anime,” Disastrously Not Knowing What to Do and What Not to Do, known colloquially as Always Breaktime, began streaming to Twitch on February 8, 2023. Its goal was to create an endless slice-of-life show that followed the lives of high school students, which was inspired by anime with stories generated by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5. Always Breaktime promised to have “new content every second for the rest of your life”, while brashly claiming “the future of anime is here.” Those boasts ultimately fell flat, though, as the project died shortly after its infancy. The project went offline just over a year after it started broadcasting.

Always Breaktime, like most projects based on language learning models, was derivative and built off of other people’s ideas. At the beginning of December 2022, Mismatch Media began streaming the first fully AI-generated show based on classic sitcoms: Nothing Forever. It only managed to pull in a meager average of three viewers over its initial 438 hours streamed —while some days being watched by no one at all— until one of its co-creators posted about it to the /r/singularity subreddit. This sparked interest and subsequent news coverage from AV Club and The Verge which in turn caused viewership of the stream to skyrocket, hitting a peak of 11,585 average viewers. The show was then banned for fourteen days on February 6, 2024 after its character Larry made transphobic and homophobic comments.

With a gap in the market for AI-generated shows, Always Breaktime was poised to find success. Viewership began to rise after Nothing Forever’s ban, inspiring the creation of a Patreon where fans could pay $100 a month to be a background character in the show, which was so popular signups had to be closed off. Allowing viewers to directly interact with and influence what they were watching, proved to be a minor innovation within the AI-generated show space. Viewers would vote on where the next scene would take place in the school and could change the size of characters’ heads, throw objects at them, or even give them a sudden jump scare. Subscribers on Twitch paid for the privilege of changing characters into maid outfits.

Similar to Nothing Forever, viewership skyrocketed following news coverage about the show, though it was only able to hit a peak average viewership of 549. While viewership numbers were holding, they dipped significantly when Nothing Forever resumed airing in March 2023. And while follower counts continued to rise, viewership just kept dropping. The Always Breaktime crew tried several gimmicks and updates to keep viewers tuning in, including adding a new main character, limited-time events, and even a full Spring Festival arc for the show where viewers could compete in games for the chance to be added as a background character for free. Despite this, average viewership continued to hemorrhage. In a final, desperate attempt to bring in an audience, a live question-and-answer event was held where viewers could “talk” to the characters and get AI-generated responses.

Social media accounts for the show went silent in April 2023, and average viewership continued to trickle down until it dipped towards 20 average viewers in July 2023, where Nothing Forever holds to this day. The show would continue to lose followers and viewership until its final stream on February 24, 2024, which pulled in a meager average of eight viewers. Broadcasts never resumed, none of its creators commented on it ceasing to stream, and no one seems to be asking for Always Breaktime to return.

During its lifetime, Always Breaktime churned out 8,842 hours of mind-numbingly derivative content, succeeding in its goal to be “longer than One Piece will ever be.” Most of its broadcasts are now technically lost media as only a small archive remains on YouTube. Its soundtrack is still available on Bandcamp, but doesn’t seem to have ever broken 50 sales. Always Breaktime’s success, like other AI products being plastered all over everything, has only been found through temporary novelty before those who interacted with them grew bored with their soulless output. While other AI-generated shows continue to release man-made horrors beyond our comprehension, Always Breaktime now seems destined to become an internet obscurity and was absolutely not the future of anime it promised to be.