Sitting in the center of Lincoln while waiting for the curtain for Ayad Akhtar McNeal—A a long -awaited theatrical production with Robert Downey Jr., with Cat In a supporting role – I have thought about how the playwrights have treated AI’s implications for over a century. In 1920 – Eh long before Laner Turing conceived his famous test and his decades before the 1956 summer summer conference which gave his name to artificial intelligence – a Czech playwright named Karel čapek wrote RUR – Universal robots of Rossum. Not only was it the first time that the word “robot” had been used, but čapek could be considered the first DOOMER of AI, because his piece dramatized an Android uprising that massacred all humanity, exception of one soul.
This winter, a small black-box production was also on New York boards CondemnedA barely veiled dramatization of the weekend where the Board of Directors of Openai non-profit gave Sam Altman the bootOnly to see him come back after a rebellion of the employees.
None of these productions have the spice of a spishy extravagance from Broadway – maybe later, we will buy tickets for a musical where Altman and Elon Musk Have a dance, but the two show up problems that have repercussions in the Silicon Valley conference rooms, Congress hearings and night consumption sessions at the annual Neirips conference. The artists behind these pieces reveal a justifiable obsession of the way in which the Superintellite AI could affect – or take over the human creative process.
Condemned is the work of Matthew Golda, a playwright and screenwriter whose works focus on the Zeitgeist. His previous parts included Square of Dimeson hipsters in the city center, and Zoomerswhose characters are Gen-Z Brooklynites. Gasda tells me that when he read on the Openai BlipHe saw this as an opportunity to take heavier dishes than young New Yorkers. Altman’s ejection and possible restoration had a defined Shakespearean atmosphere. Golda’s Two-Act Play On the Topic Features Two Separate Casts, One Depting the Altman Character’s Team in Exile and the other focused on the Board-Including A Genuine Doomer Seemingly Based on Ai Theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky, and A Greedy Venture Capitalist- that Their coup turns against him. The two groups do a lot of gabbing on the perils, the promise and the morality of the AI while they shoot their predicates.
Unsurprisingly, they find nothing like a solution. The first act ends with the dramatis personae taking alcohol; In act two, the characters engulf the mushrooms. When I mention to Gasda that it seems that his characters destroy the consequences of building AI, he says that it was intentional. “If the game has a message, it’s something like that,” he says. He adds that there is an even darker angle. “There are a lot of suggestions that the Fictional LLM is waiting for its time and manipulates the characters. It is up to the public to decide whether it is a total hokum or if it is potentially real. “(Condemned is still running in Brooklyn and Open in San Francisco in March.)
McNealA Broadway production with a movie star who played a character based on Elon Musk, is a more ambitious work, with indicating screens that project and publish as if AI was itself a character. Jacob McNeal from Downey, a narcissistic and addictive novelist, who wins the Nobel and loses his soul, finds himself hung on the most dangerous substance of all – the attraction of the instant virtuosity of a large language model.
The two playwrights are concerned about the depth of the tangled AI in the writing process. In an interview in the Atlantic, Akhtar, a winner of Pulitzer, says that the hours of experimentation with the LLMS helped him write a better game. He even gives Chatgpt the last literal word. “It’s a piece on AI,” he explains. “It goes without saying that I have been able, in several months, so that AI gives me something that I could use in the room.” Meanwhile, while Gasda gave dramaturgy credits to Chatgpt and Claude in the Condemned Program, he fears that AI will steal his words, speculating only to preserve their unique character, human writers could return to paper to hide their work from the companies of Avid Content. He has also just finished a novel in 2040 “on a writer who sold all his works at AI and has nothing to do”.
