This summer season, Ayad Akhtar was fighting the ultimate scene of “McNeal,” his knotty and disorienting play about a Nobel Prize-winning writer who makes use of synthetic intelligence to write a novel.
He wished the title character, performed by Robert Downey Jr. in his Broadway debut, to ship a monologue that appeared like a pc wrote it. So Akhtar uploaded what he had written into ChatGPT, gave this system a record of phrases, and informed it to produce a speech within the type of Shakespeare. The outcomes have been so compelling that he learn the speech to the solid on the subsequent rehearsal.
“Their jaws dropped,” Akhtar mentioned. “It had preserved the speech that I wrote, utilizing these phrases in such fascinating ways in which it was astonishing to everyone there.”
Finally, Akhtar used solely two of the chatbot’s strains. However his try to mimic A.I.-generated textual content — an oddly round means of a human imitating a pc’s imitation of a human — had an uncanny impact: Downey’s supply of the ultimate speech feels each intimate and surprisingly disembodied.
“It’s the one secret lie that Ayad tells in the entire play,” Downey mentioned, sitting on the sting of the Vivian Beaumont stage, the place he, Akhtar and the play’s director, Bartlett Sher, gathered lately to discuss “McNeal.” “The one factor that isn’t true about this play is that A.I. wrote the ultimate speech.”