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Roll Over Shakespeare: ChatGPT Is Here
Theater productions Doomers and McNeal tackle AI’s impact on humanity and the creative process.
Sitting in Lincoln Center awaiting the curtain for Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal —a much anticipated theater production starring Robert Downey Jr., with ChatGPT in a supporting role—I mused how playwrights have been dealing with the implications of AI for over a century. Gasda’s two-act play on the topic features two separate casts, one depicting the Altman character’s team in exile and the other focused on the board—including a genuine doomer seemingly based on AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky, and a greedy venture capitalist—as they realize that their coup is backfiring. As Akhtar said in the Atlantic interview, “There is something irreducibly human about the theater, and … over time, it is going to continue to demonstrate its value in a world where virtuality is increasingly the norm.” I found McNeal ’s ending particularly powerful, as we learn that our protagonist has perhaps fallen too far into the rabbit hole of ChatGPT.
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