This summer, Ayad Akhtar struggled with the final scene of “MacNeil,” a difficult and disorienting play about a Nobel Prize-winning author who uses artificial intelligence to write novels.
He wanted the title character, played by Robert Downey Jr. in his Broadway debut, to deliver a monologue that sounded like it was written by a computer. So Akhtar uploaded his writing to ChatGPT, gave the program a list of words, and told it to create a speech in Shakespeare’s style. The results were so convincing that he read his speech to the cast at the next rehearsal.
“They were jaw-dropping,” Akhtar said. “I had saved a speech that I had written, and I used the words in such a fascinating way that everyone there was amazed.”
In the end, Akhtar used only two lines of chatbot. But his attempt to imitate AI-generated text – a strangely circular process in which humans imitate computers’ imitations of humans – had a strange effect. Downey’s final speech feels both intimate and strangely insubstantial.
“This is the only secret lie that Ayad tells in the play,” Downey said, sitting on the edge of the Vivian Beaumont stage. So he, Akhtar and theater director Bartlett Shah recently met to discuss “McNeil.” “The only thing about this play that isn’t true is that an AI wrote the final speech.”
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