Sitting in Lincoln Center awaiting the curtain for Ayad Akhtar's McNeal– A long -awaited theater production with Robert Downey Jr., with chatgpt in a supporting role – I have dealt for more than a century how stage writers deal with the implications of AI. In 1920 – well before Alan Turing conceived his famous test and decades before the Summer Dartmouth conference of 1956 that gave artificial intelligence his name – wrote a Czech playwright named Karel čapek wrote Rur – The Universal Robots of Rossum. This was not only the first time that the word 'robot' was used, but Čapek can qualify as the first AI -Doomer, because his game dramatized an Android that had slaughtered all humanity, except for a single soul.
Also on the boards in New York City this winter there was a small black box production called DoomersA thin -veiled dramatization of the weekend where the non -profit board of OpenAI Sam Altman gave the boot, only to see him return after an uprising from an employee.
None of these productions has the Pizzazzz of a spectacular Broadway extravaganza-Massien we will later buy tickets for a musical where Altman and Elon Musk have a dance-off-but both wrestling with vocationals that reflected in Silicon Valley Conference Rooms, Congressional Horses, Congressional Hours, Congression , and late-night drinking sessions at the annual Neurips conference. The artists behind these plays reveal a justified obsession with how super intelligent AI can influence the human creative process – or take over.
Doomers Is the work of Matthew Gassda, a playwright and screenwriter whose works zero on the spirit of the times. Have recorded his previous plays Dimes squareacross the center of hipsters, and Zoomerswhose characters are gene brooklynites. Gasda tells me that when he read about the OpenAi blip, he saw it as an opportunity to take heavier than young New Yorkers. Altman's droppings and final restoration had a clear Shakespearian atmosphere. Gashda's two-act play on the subject contains two separate casts, one shows the team of the Altman character in exile and the other focused on the board-included a real doomer who is apparently based on ai-theoretician Eliezer Yudkowsky and a greedy Venture capitalist-as they realize that their coup is opposed. Both groups do a lot about the dangers, promise and morality of AI while sniping their perilarability.
It is not surprising that they do not come up with a solution. The first act ends with the dramatis personae that takes pictures of drinks; In Act Two the characters swallow mushrooms. When I mention Gasda that it seems like his characters are diving the consequences of building AI, he says that it was deliberately. “If the piece has a message, it's something like that,” he says. He adds that there is a dark corner. “There are many suggestions that the fictional LLM weakens its time and manipulates the characters. It is up to the public to decide whether that is total Hokum or whether that is potentially realistic. (((Doomers is still running in Brooklyn and will be opened in San Francisco in March.)
McNealA Broadway production with a movie star who played a famous character based on Elon Musk, is an ambitious work, with flashy screens who are project prompts and outputs as if AI itself is a character. Downey's Jacob McNeal, a narcissistic novelist and substance abuser, who acquires the Nobel and loses his soul, ends addicted to perhaps the most dangerous substance of all – the temptation of immediate virtuosity from a large language model.
Both stage writers are worried about how deep AI will become entangled in the writing process. In an interview in the Atlantic Ocean, Akhtar, a Pulitzer winner, says that experimenting with LLMS for hours helped him to write a better game. He even gives chatgpt the literal final word. “It's a play about AI,” he explains. “It goes without saying that in the course of many months I was able to finally give the AI something that I could use in the play.” Meanwhile, while Gasda dramaturgy gave credits to Chatgpt and Claude in the Doomers Program, he is worried that AI will steal his words and speculates that in order to maintain their uniqueness, human writers can return to paper to hide their work for content-hungry AI companies. He has also just finished a novel in 2040 “about a writer who has sold all his works to AI and has nothing to do.”
