AI, coming soon to a theatre near you
Is AI coming soon to a theatre near you? And by theatre - I don't mean the movie theatre. I mean the kind of theatre where Shakespeare crafted his wordy, imagistic and lyrical work. Work that makes audiences feel high brow and sophisticated - especially when they get through all that iambic pentameter.
Can a computer app create a theatre experience? Even if said app has no childhood trauma, broken relationships and thwarted dreams to draw from?
The answer, in a word, is yes. Well, sort of yes.
As of today, AI has used been used to create set and lighting design, and even plays in theatre companies all over the world, including our very own Calgary. To be honest, I find it all a little bit - daunting. Maybe daunting isn't the word. Terrifying. Horrendous.
Potentially awful.
So, in order to quell my fears, I reached out to talk to theatre creators in Calgary to discuss the pending Theatre AI Apocalypse.
Jenna Rodgers, a local director, artistic director, facilitator and dramaturg, spoke to me about what she perceives to be the pros and cons of AI in creating theatre.
Jenna: I think of AI as a tool. While AI is becoming inevitable, it cannot replace theatre because it cannot replace humanity. And humanity connects us and divides us. So, AI feels like less of a direct threat to my profession or to theatre itself.
Jenna reminded me that we have adapted to the internet and Google and still creativity continues and even flourishes with a technology no one could have even imagined just decades prior to the current moment. Her sensible and practical view was comforting, but a question still haunted me.
What about the writers?
While I don't believe theatre writers are on the verge of an Arnold Schwarzenegger future of vicious eye-laser shooting robotic muscle men, I do see the impending doomsday of AI in a more quiet, slow-death fashion. Especially for writers. No, your basic script writer such as myself won't be dashing behind car doors like Sarah Connor, clutching my pages of original content to my chest like they were wordy, android-smashing saviors. What we're facing, especially as writers, is the threat of being quietly, steadily... replaced.
The WGA Writer's Guild of America (WGA) (as well as one of my own unions - the Screen Actor's Guild (SAG)) - have been striking to avoid a future of unlicensed use of actors' images as well as the unauthorized, unpaid uploading of writers' work into AI machines (Yes, I said "AI machines" and no, this is not a tech savvy article). If you caught Netflix's Joan Is Awful, the premiere episode of Black Mirror, it becomes apparent that the possibility of an AI appropriation of actors and writers' images and work isn't that far fetched. The WGA and SAG have fought and are fighting to make sure that actors and writers images and work are not exploited by this new and mostly unregulated innovation.
It's pretty clear that digital mediums might be ripe for an AI takeover creativity-wise.
Indeed, many blockbuster movies are created with the intention of wringing anything but box office potential out of them. All movie goers have left, it often seems, is formulaic stuff that already sounds like robots wrote it. (I'm thinking of a new award category at the Oscars - Most AI Sounding Script).
But can AI write a play?
Jamie Dudsdon, the artistic producer of Calgary Young People Theatre (CYPT), along with her colleague, theatre director and writer Noah Boyle, director and theatre deviser, spoke to me about the astounding new play, Someday currently running at CYPT. Noah co-created Someday at CYPT with a group of youth in their late teens and early twenties.
The script was based on a quartet of short stories by Isaac Asimov. And the final collaborator on Someday? You guessed it - a text generating AI.
Jamie: Noah approached me with a plan to get a group of kids to come together to use the stories from Asimov - including his short story Someday, (after which the play is named) as well as Asimov's story of the Bard, the storytelling robot. AI was ultimately just a tool that we used and the kids crafted it into a narrative, using all these different inspirations. They created this show called Someday, and it's beautiful.
The play sounds extraordinary. There is something deeply compelling about theatre created by people going through major life transitions- especially the transition from childhood to the dawning reality that life as you know it could change completely forever.
I asked Jamie, with all this human/AI/Famous deceased writer collaboration, if she was a fan of AI. Her response was sort of surprising.
Jamie: No. AI is pulling these ideas from artists work. This show is an exception because it's a play about AI. I'm excited about it, but I will admit it is not something I would want to do again. I have ethical issues regarding the livelihood of people who are making their living in the arts.
Noah, the director and innovator behind the show, informed me that the youth creators involved in this production had serious, relevant questions and concerns about AI - and those questions and concerns weren't all enthusiastic and tech positive. He shared with me that the youth, inspired by Asimov's probing into the consciousness of robots, created the scripts and fed prompts into the AI to create the AI character's dialogue.
So I wondered if, after all of this, there wasn't a bright spot at the end of the Artificially Intelligent Rainbow. Can AI mean any good for theatre? What if AI finally got it right and didn't, when I gave it a command to write in iambic pentameter, sort of mess it up? (And it did mess it up. Thank. God.) But how long before AI does everything perfectly? And what hope is there for theatre makers then?
Noah: I definitely think I wonder about what's gonna happen when we have a human written script and that becomes a really special thing, a highly exclusive thing to watch.
Theatre is magic because there's always flaws in the human made thing. So I think what we might get is that AI has become too perfect and we pull it back and embrace ...the human nature and the flawed nature - that might be something the community comes to crave.
So theatre might be the Sarah and John Connor of the arts after all. AI fatigue might have us clamoring to gather in groups of other imperfect people who don't have uncopywrighted access to all the written words in the world. And, as we are cuddled close in rickety theatre aisles, appreciating each other's bumbling, faltering, challenging tendency to alchemize beauty from our gorgeous messups, we'll have Chat GPT to thank.
Thanks, AI.
Now generate that.
Above: Someday. Photo courtesy of Calgary Young Peoples Theatre.
