An AI written stage play has debuted on the stage for the first time. This was what followed when a brief intervention from humans to let the algorithm know the basic setup. The 60-minute play was performed by Prague’s Švanda Theatre in collaboration with The Czech Centre London.The play was described as “telling a story of joy and sorrow of everyday life from a robot’s point of view”.
The GPT-2, the AI used for the project, was created by the company OpenAI, which was co-founded by Elon Musk. The algorithm generates text based on prompts from a computer and has been put to tasks such as writing fake articles and generating poetry.
This had mixed results, generating stories that are written in the style of real articles, but with a few hints that all is not right. For example,when we typed in the headline Earth’s Polar Regions face Space Hurricanes, the generator (which you should try for yourself)came back with the following story:
The American Meteor Society tracks thousands of reports of space weather worldwide each year, and after the recent hurricanes there have been over 350 reports. When these storms impact our planet it can have serious consequences, even for the relatively minor losses seen in the aftermath of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria.
Turning its algorithm equivalent of a quill to writing a play, the AI showed that it’s not quite prepared to take over that task from humans.
The dialogue from the play had a strange quality and became a bit risqué. In some scenes the robot goes to chat up women with lines like “I wish my binary self had a body like that”.
“The difference between a living author and artificial intelligence is that artificial intelligence does not contradict and is obedient,” the director stated “While authors sometimes have hard times giving up their ideas, AI starts writing again after it gets a signal and it just does it with no complaints.”
