On Theatre And Artificial Intelligence

Last Modified: Nov 11, 2024

Originally written 11th November 2024

I'm not interested in the 'creative potential' of AI. If AI wrote a play that was reported to be totally indistinguishable to a play written by a human, I still wouldn't be interested in seeing it, not even out of morbid curiosity. I feel this way for the same reason that I don't get very excited about plays written by human beings who I consider to not have the ability to contribute much to my personal existing worldview. I don't like a lot of student plays for this reason. There are obviously exceptions, but not enough for me to be very interested in watching a huge amount of student-written plays at festivals.

For me, a big part of what interests me about any creative endeavour is the person who made it. Why is this story so important? Why are they the one telling it? Who else has told it before, and why should I listen to this version? This doesn't just apply to 'intellectual' stuff either. If you're clowning about on stage in silly costumes, getting the audience on stage to do odd little tasks, (or whatever it is Lee Kennedy is promoting these days) first of all, I want to be laughing and getting weirded out. Second of all, I want to know why I shouldn't be laughing and getting weirded out somewhere else, at something else. Why you? Why this?

AI has no opinions. We all talk about 'AI' like it's this single well-meaning robot who's simultaneously guiding missiles, pretending to be girlfriends, plagiarising maths equations, and changing the prices on eggs. 'AI' is a method, not an interpretation. I am simplifying here, but AI is usually drawing on a database, and a collection of 'important patterns' which it applies to the database to get results that humans want. AI doesn't 'understand'. It can't care if the human who gave it the pretty patterns is a Nazi. It just does stuff. It's for this reason that I believe AI cannot interpret creatively. I don't think it can even interpret ineptly, people just use AI to lob spaghetti at the public, to see if it gets eaten.

The only remarkable thing about AI being used creatively is the spectacle of a machine that is good at pretending. It's silicon valley tech bros jerking off to the sound of the ice caps melting. It's The Mechanical Turk all over again, and I'm fucking bored of it.

Theatre, by comparison, never really pretends to be real. You'll often feel real emotions, and get wrapped up in the story. You might forget you're in a theatre and just experience the journey of the characters happening in front of you for a few hours. It's magical when that happens. But it's not real, and nobody is pretending it is. A lot of the time, at the theatre, you're watching one of two types of show. You're either watching a show that deliberately breaks the fourth wall, with the characters talking directly to the audience, and everything not being real is part of the show, or, you're watching a show where the actors pretend the audience isn't there, when they blatantly are. I mean, you're in the audience. The audience is there! The show could have the most realistic set ever, and buckets of real crying, but it's all made up, and anyone can see it, immediately.

Theatre is so important to me, at the moment, precisely because it feels like the only visual art form that is not pretending to be real. Aside from perhaps... comic strips? Not only is AI generated content fucking everywhere, but cafes and bookshops are designed to look good on Instagram. Newspaper headlines are written not to summarise the story underneath, but so they can get angry reacts on Facebook. Food delivery might come from a real restaurant, or it might come from a decoupled modular representation of restaurant food, a dark kitchen (which in theory is a great idea, but if dark kitchens say that's what they are, I expect sales would drop). Did you know 80% of bread sold in UK supermarkets isn't actually bread? It looks a lot like bread, and it's kind of made in a similar way. But it isn't really. And maybe you eat bread every day. Maybe you can't afford not to, and that ain't your fault. People have no idea that our bread is fucked, and keep wondering why so many people report allergic reactions to it these days. (Look up the Chorleywood method).

Just once or twice, in my day-to-day life, I want to know that the thing I am looking at is what it says it is. It's not a block of emulsifiers, or a carousel of slot machine visuals, or a laundry list of SEO buzzwords. I just want to know that the thing I am looking at is what it says it is. I feel absolutely insane that this feels so hard to find. I just want to know that the thing I am looking at is what it says it is. That's all.

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