Roll Over Shakespeare: ChatGPT Is Here

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. In 1920—well before Alan Turing devised his famous test and decades before the 1956 summer Dartmouth conference that gave artificial intelligence its name—a Czech playwright named Karel Čapek wrote R.U.R.—Rossum’s Universal Robots. Not only was this the first time the word “robot” was employed, but Čapek may qualify as the first AI doomer, since his play dramatized an android uprising that slaughtered all of humanity, save for a single soul.

Also on the boards in New York City this winter was a small black-box production called Doomers, a thinly veiled dramatization of the weekend where OpenAI’s nonprofit board gave Sam Altman the boot, only to see him return after an employee rebellion.

Neither of these productions have the pizzazz of a splashy Broadway extravaganza—maybe later we’ll buy tickets to a musical where Altman and Elon Musk have a dance-off—but both grapple with issues that reverberate in Silicon Valley conference rooms, Congressional hearings, and late-night drinking sessions at the annual NeurIPS conference. The artists behind these plays reveal a justifiable obsession with how superintelligent AI might affect—or take over—the human creative process.

Doomers is the work of Matthew Gasda, a playwright and screenwriter whose works zero in on the zeitgeist. His previous plays have included Dimes Square, about downtown hipsters, and Zoomers, whose characters are Gen-Z Brooklynites. Gasda tells me that when he read about the OpenAI Blip, he saw it as an opportunity to take on weightier fare than young New Yorkers. Altman’s ejection and eventual restoration had a definite Shakespearian vibe. 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. Both groups do a lot of gabbing about the perils, promise, and morality of AI while they snipe about their predicaments.

Not surprisingly, they don’t come up with anything like a solution. The first act ends with the dramatis personae taking shots of booze; in act two, the characters gobble mushrooms. When I mention to Gasda that it seems like his characters are ducking the consequences of building AI, he says that was intentional. “If the play has a message, it’s something like that,” he says. He adds that there’s an even darker angle. “There’s a lot of suggestions that the fictional LLM is biding its time and manipulating the characters. It’s up to audiences to decide whether that’s total hokum or whether that’s potentially real.” (Doomers is still running in Brooklyn and will open in San Francisco in March.)

McNeal, a Broadway production with a movie star who famously played a character based on Elon Musk, is a more ambitious work, with flashing screens that project prompts and outputs as if AI is itself a character. Downey’s Jacob McNeal, a narcissistic novelist and substance abuser, who gains the Nobel and loses his soul, winds up hooked on perhaps the most dangerous substance of all—the lure of instant virtuosity from a large language model.

Both playwrights are concerned about how deeply AI will become entangled in the writing process. In an interview in The Atlantic, Akhtar, a Pulitzer winner, says that hours of experimentation with LLMs helped him write a better play. He even gives ChatGPT the literal last word. “It’s a play about AI,” he explains. “It stands to reason that I was able, over the course of many months, to finally get the AI to give me something that I could use in the play.” Meanwhile, while Gasda gave dramaturgy credits to ChatGPT and Claude in the Doomers program, he worries that AI will steal his words, speculating that to preserve their uniqueness, human writers might revert to paper to hide their work from content-hungry AI companies. He’s also just finished a novel set in 2040 “about a writer who sold all of his works to AI and has nothing to do.”