At Lincoln Center, anticipation filled the air as audiences awaited the start of Ayad Akhtar’s theater production, McNeal, featuring Robert Downey Jr. in a leading role and ChatGPT in a supporting capacity. The piece highlighted the engagement of playwrights with artificial intelligence themes spanning over a century. In 1920, prior to Alan Turing’s well-known test and the 1956 summer Dartmouth conference that formally introduced the term artificial intelligence, Czech playwright Karel Čapek wrote R.U.R.—Rossum’s Universal Robots. This piece marked the debut use of the word "robot" and portrayed an android uprising leading to the near extinction of humanity, bar one survivor.
During the same winter season in New York City, a smaller production titled Doomers was being staged in a black-box theater. This play presented a portrayal of the events during a weekend when OpenAI’s board dismissed Sam Altman, only for him to be reinstated following opposition from employees.
Although neither of these productions boasts the grandiosity typical of a Broadway show, they delve into themes stirring discussions within Silicon Valley boardrooms, Congressional investigations, and social gatherings at the annual NeurIPS conference. The creators of these plays share a preoccupation with the influence or potential dominance of superintelligent AI over human creativity.
Doomers, crafted by playwright and screenwriter Matthew Gasda, directly addresses contemporary issues. His past works include Dimes Square, centered on urban hipsters, and Zoomers, featuring Gen Z characters in Brooklyn. Upon reading about the OpenAI incident, Gasda saw an opportunity to explore weightier themes. The dramatic dismissal and reappointment of Altman struck him as having a Shakespearean quality. Gasda’s two-act play includes two different casts: one portraying Altman’s team in exile and the other depicting the board, which includes a character resembling AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky and a venture capitalist. These casts engage in extensive discourse regarding the hazards, potential, and ethics of AI while contending with their situations.
The narrative does not yield a concrete resolution. The first act concludes with characters taking shots of alcohol, progressing in the second act to consuming hallucinogenic mushrooms. Gasda explains that this avoidance of consequences is deliberate. The play suggests a darker narrative strand, insinuating that the fictional large language model (LLM) is lying in wait and manipulating characters, leaving it up to the audience to determine the authenticity of this notion. Doomers is currently performing in Brooklyn, with plans to debut in San Francisco in March.
McNeal, a prominent Broadway production headlined by a well-known actor who previously portrayed a character based on Elon Musk, incorporates visually dynamic elements such as projected screens simulating AI prompts and responses, effectively turning AI into a character of its own. Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Jacob McNeal, a self-centered writer and substance user, showcases a journey where the character achieves a Nobel Prize while losing his sense of self, ultimately becoming dependent on the allure of instant expertise offered by an LLM.
Both Akhtar and Gasda express concerns about AI’s deepening integration into the writing process. Akhtar, a Pulitzer Prize recipient, shared in an interview with The Atlantic that extensive experimentation with LLMs enhanced his playwriting, enabling him to incorporate contributions from ChatGPT. Meanwhile, Gasda, who acknowledged ChatGPT and Claude in the Doomers program credits, fears that AI might appropriate his words. He speculates that to safeguard originality, writers might revert to analog methods to shield their work from AI-driven content acquisition. Gasda has also finished a novel set in 2040 about a writer who sells all his work to AI, leaving him with nothing.
