The Creative Intersection of AI and Theatre
This summer, acclaimed playwright Ayad Akhtar found himself grappling with the intricacies of the final scene in his latest work, “McNeal.” The play presents a complex narrative centered around a Nobel Prize-winning author who harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to craft a novel. In a fascinating twist, Akhtar sought to create a monologue for the title character, portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. in his Broadway debut, that would evoke the essence of a computer-generated script.
To achieve this, Akhtar turned to ChatGPT, an advanced language model, uploading his existing text and providing the program with a curated list of words. He instructed it to generate a speech reminiscent of the style of Shakespeare. The outcome was striking. When Akhtar presented the chatbot’s output to the cast during the following rehearsal, the room was filled with astonished silence.
- “Their jaws dropped,”
- Akhtar recalled, noting how the AI had skillfully preserved the essence of his original writing while manipulating the selected words in unexpected, captivating ways.
Ultimately, Akhtar chose to incorporate only a couple of lines from the AI’s creation into the final version. Yet, this intriguing exercise in emulating AI-generated text—an almost paradoxical endeavor where a human attempts to replicate a computer’s imitation of human creativity—yielded an uncanny result. Downey’s delivery of the concluding monologue strikes a delicate balance, feeling both profoundly personal and unsettlingly detached.
“It’s the one secret lie that Ayad tells in the whole play,”
Downey remarked, as he sat on the edge of the Vivian Beaumont stage during a recent discussion with Akhtar and the play’s director, Bartlett Sher. “The only thing that isn’t true about this play is that A.I. wrote the final speech.”
