Roll Over Shakespeare: ChatGPT Is Here

I perused how poets have been dealing with the ramifications of AI for more than a century while waiting the veil on Ayad Akhtar’s much-anticipated theater production McNeal in Lincoln Center. A Czech playwright named Karel apek wrote R. U. R. — Rosenstein’s Universal Robots in 1920, well before Alan Turing’s popular evaluation and years before the 1956 summertime Dartmouth meeting that gave artificial intelligence its name. Apek may count as the first AI doomer since his enjoy dramatized an iphone revolt that slaughtered everyone but society for one spirit. Not only was this the first time the term “robot” was used.

A little black-box manufacturing called Doomers, a thinly veiled portrayal of the trip where OpenAI’s nonprofit table gave Sam Altman the heel, only to see him returning after an employee rebellion, was also on the boards in New York City this winter.

Although neither of these productions has the swag of a lavish Broadway show, we might afterwards purchase tickets to a musical with Altman and Elon Musk dancing in a dance-off, but both deal with issues that resonate in Silicon Valley conference rooms, hearings, and late-night having at the monthly NeurIPS meeting. The work of the authors of these plays demonstrates a legitimate obsession with how superintelligent AI might influence or overshadow the people creative process.

Matthew Gasda, a poet and screenwriter, has written Doomers, which focuses on the contemporary mood. His past acts have included Dimes Square, about city yuppies, and Zoomers, whose heroes are Gen-Z Brooklynites. Gasda claims that when he learned about the OpenAI Blip, he saw it as an opportunity to take on heavier suffer than younger New Yorkers. The expulsion and subsequent restoration of Altman had a distinct Shakespearian vibe. Gasda’s two-act perform on the subject features two separate casts, one depicting the Altman writer’s group in captivity and the other focused on the board—including a true doomer apparently based on AI thinker Eliezer Yudkowsky, and a selfish venture capitalist—as they realize that their coup is backfiring. Both parties do a lot of gabbing about the risks, promises, and conscience of AI while they snipe about their ordeals.

Not surprisingly, they don’t come up with something like a remedy. In work two, the characters swallow mushrooms, and the dramatis personae finishes with the dramatis personae taking photos of whiskey. Gasda claims that Gasda’s claim that it seems like his figures are avoiding the effects of creating AI was intentional. ” If the perform has a concept, it’s something like that”, he says. He adds that there’s an yet darker position. There are numerous indications that the imaginary LLM is skipping ahead and manipulating the personalities. It’s up to audiences to choose whether that’s overall hogwash or whether that’s likely real”. ( Doomers will debut in San Francisco in March. )

A more ambitious job, McNeal, a Broadway production starring an actor who famously played an Elon Musk character, features flashing panels that task prompts and outputs as if AI were its own personality. Jacob McNeal, a selfish writer and substance abuser who wins the Nobel and loses his soul, ends up hooked on the lure of quick virtuosity from a huge language model.

Both playwrights are concerned about how ingrained AI will be in the writing process. In an interview in The Atlantic, Akhtar, a Pulitzer winner, says that hours of experimentation with LLMs helped him write a better play. He even gives ChatGPT the final word in the script. ” It’s a play about AI”, he explains. ” It stands to reason that I was finally able to get the AI to give me something to use in the play over the course of many months.” Meanwhile, while Gasda gave dramaturgy credits to ChatGPT and Claude in the Doomers program, he worries that AI will steal his words, speculating that to preserve their uniqueness, human writers might revert to paper to hide their work from content-hungry AI companies. A novel about a writer who sold all of his works to AI and has nothing to do was also just finished by him in 2040.

The most susceptible form of art is probably theater itself. Its essence is made up of flesh-and-blood actors who create emotional connection with an audience whose iPhones are ( hopefully ) hidden in their pockets while bringing words to life on stage. In a world where virtuality is increasingly common, Akhtar said in an interview with the Atlantic that there is an irreducibly human quality to the theater, and it will continue to demonstrate its worth over time. As we learn that our protagonist may have strayed too far into ChatGPT’s rabbit hole, McNeal’s ending was particularly powerful. The performance ends on a supposedly chatbot-created Shakespearean note that left us wondering whether the playwright had followed him down the same rabbit hole and how much of the protagonist’s work was created by AI. The newly blurb between thought and algorithm gave me the gloomy impression that reality had been distorted. That’s good theater.

Then the lights went out in Lincoln Center, and I was transported back to the everyday world, only to discover that Marc Andreessen, the mastermind behind the most advanced AI accelerationist, was responsible for the bald head inches from my knees in the seat in front of me. Even ChatGPT couldn’t have come up with a better plot twist.