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THEaiTRE, a theatre play entirely written by AI, premiered roughly one year ago, in February 2021. In August of the same year, the Young Vic premiered their show AI featuring the GPT-3 system on stage. Artificial intelligence is here to stay. And becoming increasingly more sophisticated; writing texts, designing art, creating plays as well as performing in them. We are entering into a new era…
In 2021, Researchers at Charles University, the Švanda Theatre, and the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague worked on an intriguing research project that merged artificial intelligence and robotics with theatre.
Their project’s main objective was to use artificial intelligence to create an innovative theatrical performance, which premiered online in February 2021.
100 years ago, the word “robot” was invented by the Czechoslovak brothers Karel and Josef Čapek.
The word appeared for the first time in Karel’s theatre play R.U.R. which premiered in 1921.
The play is about humanoid robots who seem happy to work for humans at first. However, later a robot rebellion leads to the extinction of the human race. The play achieved a fast international success when it was performed not only in Prague but also in London, New York, and Chicago.
Karel Čapek was one of the first people who thought of a potential threat if artificial intelligence inventions happen too fast or without proper regulations.
Did he predict the threats of the 21st century? Or… are robots and artificial intelligence no danger for us?
THEaiTRE says, “To celebrate the centenary of the invention of the word “robot” we wanted to start a project to see if a robot can write a theatre play. Do you think artificial intelligence is able to create an enjoyable theatre script? Can a robot become a playwright like its own father Karel Čapek 100 years ago?”
“We found out on 26 February 2021 during the premiere of the first AI-written play, titled AI: When a Robot Writes a Play. The play was watched by 18’450 devices (perhaps up to 30’000 people).”
The THEaiTRE researchers experimented largely with a pretrained language model called GPT-2. This is an open-source model developed by the OpenAI consortium and trained on a large amount of online English texts.
GPT-2 is a generative language model, which means that when adequately trained it can complete unfinished texts using similar language and covering related themes. For instance, if it is fed the first paragraph of a news article, the model will try to generate additional paragraphs on the same topic, using the existing text as a source of inspiration and yet also generating sentences about new concepts.
Just a few months after the premiere of AI: When a Robot Writes a Play, the Guardian reported about the Young Vic theatre creating a play using artificial intelligence as well.
In this instance, the play wasn’t written by AI, but the GPT-3 system was used onstage to create a surreal and spellbinding show.
“The audience was invited to ask questions and GPT-3 seemed like a natural performer, creating limericks on demand (“There once was a man from Nantucket …”), impersonating Donald Trump’s tweets (“I am very smart. I am very rich. I have the best words. Some of my words are the best”).”
Yet GPT-3 also began to present serious themes around freedom and the value – or otherwise – of human emotion.
“At times, the AI system sounded like a hyper-logical Spock, at other times a cheeky C-3PO,” says The Guardian.
Throughout the show, it became clear that, given the right prompts, the GPT-3 AI system shows itself capable of thinking originally and, even more miraculously, capable of imagining fictional worlds.
We are truly venturing into an open, unknown future, where anything is possible.
TechXplore: “THEaiTRE, a theatre play written entirely by machines”
The Guardian: “Rise of the robo-drama: Young Vic creates new play using artificial intelligence”
The Theatre Times: “Artificial Intelligence Comes to Theatrical Design”
Noema Lab: Introduction to Drama and Artificial Intelligence
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The Art Biennale ART SAFIENTAL in the Swiss Alps
Liam Klenk was born in Central Europe and has since lived on four continents. Liam has always been engaged in creative pursuits, ranging from photography and graphic design, to writing short stories and poetry, to working in theatre and shows. In 2016, Liam published his first book and memoir, 'Paralian'.
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