Roll through Shakespeare: Chatgpt is here

Seats in the Lincoln Center and was waiting for the curtain for Ayad Akhtars McNeal– A highly awaited theater production with Robert Downey Jr., with Chatt In a supportive role – I wondered how playwrights have dealt with the effects of AI for over a century. 1920 – Well, before Alan Turing developed his famous test and decades before the Sommer -Dartmouth conference from 1956, the artificial intelligence gave its name – wrote a Czech playwright named Karel Čapek Rur – Rossum’s Universal robot. This was not only the first time that the word “robot” was used, but Čapek can qualify as the first AI doomer, since his game dramatized an Android uprising that slaughtered all of humanity apart from a single soul.

Also in the boards in New York City this winter was a small black box production called DoomerA thinly veiled dramatization of the weekend, where Openais gave non -profit board member Sam Altman The bootJust to return to an employed rebellion.

None of these productions has the pizza seed of a lively Broadway extravagance – maybe we will later buy tickets for a musical where Altman and Elon Muschus Do you have a dance-off-be both fight with topics in the conference rooms of the Silicon Valley, in the hearings of the congress and in the annual conference for neurips conference, and at the late-time drinking sessions. The artists behind these pieces show a justified obsession of how the superintelligent -KI can influence or adopt the human creative process.

Doomer is the work of Matthew Gasda, a playwright and screenwriter, whose work on the zeitgeist occurs. His earlier pieces have included Dimes SquareAbout hipsters in the city center and Zoomerwhose characters are Gen-Z Brooklynite. Gasda tells me that when he was las Open BlipHe saw it as an opportunity to take over more important dishes than young New York. Altman’s expense and later restoration had a certain Shakespeare mood. The two-act game from Gasda on the subject shows two separate casts that the team of the old man character in exile and the other on the board concentrating a real book punishment that their coup d’état back. Both groups have a lot about the dangers, promises and morals of the AI ​​as they snap over their predicaments.

It is not surprising that you do not come up with like a solution. The first act ends with the dramatis personnel that take the recordings of alcohol; In act two, the characters consume mushrooms. When I mention Gasda that it looks as if his characters cheat on the consequences of the AI ​​structure, he says that this was intended. “If the piece has a message, it’s something like that,” he says. He adds that there is an even darker angle. “There are many suggestions that the fictional LLM asks its time and manipulates the characters. It is up to the audience to decide whether this is totally Hokum or whether this may be real. “(Doomer still runs in Brooklyn and will Open in San Francisco in March.)

McNealA Broadway production with a film star who played a figure on Elon Musk is an ambitious work with flashing screens that request and issue as if AI himself was a character. Downeys Jacob McNeal, a narcissistic novelist and substance protection that receives the noble and loses his soul, ends up with the most dangerous substance of all – the bait of immediate virtuosity from a large voice model.

Both playwrights are concerned about how deep AI is involved in the writing process. In an interview in the Atlantic, Akhtar, a Pulitzer winner says that hours of experimenting with LLMS helped him to write a better game. He even gives chatt the literal last word. “It’s a piece about AI,” he explains. “It is obvious that over the course of many months I was finally able to get the AI ​​to give myself something that I could use in the play.” In the meantime, Gasda Chatgpt and Claude gave in the dramaturgy -Credits Doomer The program fears that AI will steal his words and speculate that human writers, in order to keep their uniqueness, could return to paper in order to hide their work from content-hungry AI companies. He just ended a novel in 2040, “about a writer who sold all his works to AI and has nothing to do.”