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McNeal and Robert Downey Jr. Dance With ChatGPT
The playwright Ayad Akhtar considers the prospects (ominous and otherwise) of AI art-making.
Before we get to the big questions of morality and contract law, there’s that central performance you’re here to see: McNeal turns out, unsurprisingly, to be an analogue to Tony Stark, still cracking wise, now transposed from arms trader to great American author (with a Jewish mother and a Catholic father and raised in Texas, so basically Roth/DeLillo/McCarthy in a blender). I just want to understand it, because it’s coming.” So as much as McNeal grouses about how AI has produced tons of word slop, the play itself tilts more in the direction of what Akhtar imagines are the technology’s possibilities: He compares the work of a language-learning model to Shakespeare, who himself downloaded the input of banal Elizabethan dramas he would have known, such as the tale of “King Leir,” and output one of the greatest tragedies ever written. The human dynamics Akhtar and Sher hang all of this on never get past cliché: McNeal confronts a cadre of women, including Martin’s assistant (Saisha Talwar), a horrifyingly underprepared magazine journalist (Brittany Bellizeare), and a former New York Times bookseditor who is pretty obviously based on Pamela Paul (Melora Hardin).
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