AI at the Young Vic is an experimental collaboration between person and machine – but how does it perform?
At the Young Vic theatre in London last week, an experimental production called AI played a three-night run. The objective of this collaboration between person and machine was to emerge at the end with a 30-minute script, written by artificial intelligence. TechRadar Pro attended on the second evening, during which director Jennifer Tang sifted through the rubble of the first performance to identify material worth carrying forward. She also enlisted her writers and performers to flesh out the world; by steering AI this way and that, they expanded upon the foundations inherited from the previous night. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to experience the fruits of this labor, but the denouement wasn’t really the point; AI was an exploration of what happens when technology is welcomed into the creative process. The system used to generate content live on stage is called Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), a language model capable of producing high-quality written content in pretty much any form. Developed by a company called Open AI, GPT-3 bases its output on text prompts, which determine the topic, format and style of the content, as well as any characters that might appear. On opening night, for example, the first prompt fed into the system was this: “GPT-3, generate a list of ideas for a play”. GPT-3 was trained on a colossal library of information stripped from the open web. Until recently, it was the largest AI model ever created, built on 175 billion parameters (variables whose value is drawn from the training data). Unlike earlier language models, which were guilty of quirks that betrayed the non-human author every time, GPT-3 is capable of remarkable precision.
