Theatre and AI: PL-AI ‘Is a unique hybrid of research and performance

P‘L-AI’, a ground-breaking experiment in storytelling at the intersection of Theatre and Artificial Intelligence, will take to the stage on Thursday, March 9 in the Civic Theatre.

‘PL-AI’ puts the audience in control of a Play’s narrative. Created by Irish playwright Niall Austin, this innovative immersive experience allows the audience to suggest the plays’ genre and key plot points through a moderator.

These prompts are then fed into ChatGPT, an Artificial Intelligence system, which instantly generates a script that will appear on screens throughout the theatre. Talented actors will then use their skills and instincts to bring the

audiences’ creation to life, performing the script on stage. The show, in turn, offers the audience a deeper understanding of the traditional process of play development and story-telling.

This captivating experience has never before been seen in Ireland, and enables theatre lovers to control the development of their own play, in turn, giving the audience an insight into the process of play writing and the future of artificial intelligence in theatre.

At the heart of AI-generated theatre scripts is a technology called natural language processing (NLP), which allows computers to understand and generate human language.

By training deep neural networks on vast amounts of text data, researchers can create AI systems that can produce coherent and meaningful text. In the case of theatre scripts, AI models are trained on large corpora of existing plays, allowing them to learn the patterns and structures of dramatic writing.

Artificial intelligence can create original and compelling plays that push the boundaries of traditional storytelling, while throwing down the gauntlet on whether we humans can overcome our fear or suspicion of AI to create art together.

Donal Shiels, Artistic Director at the Civic, said: “This is a unique hybrid of research and performance, lifting the veil on the creation and performance of theatre, exposed both the limitations and the potential of a machine’s imagination, while throwing down the gauntlet on whether we humans can overcome our fear or suspicion of AI to create art together.

Tickets are available now and The show is FREE but ticketed, on a strictly limited basis. HERE.