It’s not hard to come up with adjectives that describe artificial intelligence — everything from helpful to intrusive to frightening. But is it funny?
Central Floridians will get the chance to judge for themselves at the upcoming UCF Celebrates the Arts festival at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Orlando when the spotlight turns on AI for a free talk-variety show, the sort you might see on late-night TV.
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The genesis of the show, titled “AI Cabaret: Late Night with Artificial Intelligence,” came from “faculty curiosity,” said Chloë Rae Edmonson, an assistant professor of theater history and dramaturgy at the University of Central Florida.
“I wonder what we could play with, using AI to make art,” she recalled faculty members discussing. “Could it help our creativity?”
Edmonson’s Topics in Technical Theatre class members, a mix of undergraduate and grad students, took up the challenge.
“I’m a big fan of emerging technologies,” said the class’s Gil Bloom, a UCF junior studying theater design and technology, with a focus on scenic and projection design. “But I was a little skeptical at first.”
Others involved were more than skeptical.
“It was not always a positive reception,” said Edmonson, recalling some colleagues’ attitude of “Why would we be encouraging this kind of job-stealing technology and weaving it into our department?”
Students were apprehensive as well.
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“I see them on their phone with Tik Tok and think they love technology, but this was approached with fear,” she said.
Bloom said the fear is justified — but not for the reasons you might think.
“There are dangers, but not what people expect. It’s not going to take over the world,” he said. But because of the way AI “learns,” it absorbs all the prejudices, stereotypes and other human failings found on the internet — and then magnifies them.
“It creates this kind of feedback loop and exacerbates all our biases,” Bloom said. “AI is trained to make us happy, it’s not trained to tell us the truth. It’s trained to tell us what we want to hear. It’s a much more subtle danger.”
Early efforts by the class included devising scenes by having AI generate a script.
“It’s actually the least interesting thing we did,” Edmonson said. “The plots were very basic. We wanted to push beyond that.”
So what will happen in the April 12 show?
For one, spectators will see performers interact with AI on stage.
“We’ve come up with some ways to do that,” Edmonson said. “It’s weird and wonderful.”
Among the acts: A game-show segment in which audience members compete to create sentences using AI-generated tokens, and a musical-theater sketch in which parents try to prove the superiority of their baby AI-bots.
Bloom points to a segment in which audience members go on speed dates with AI chatbots. But his favorite bit involves Siri and Alexa, who nowadays are considered lesser technology.
“They are not AI, they are just a couple of really great ‘if statements,’” he said. “If the user says this, then you say that.”
He describes them a commentators on the action a la Statler and Waldorf from “The Muppet Show.”
“They are going to be heckling the whole time,” he said.
Throughout the process, some ideas have been more successful than others — if you count replacing humans as a success.
“There are some [parts of the show] where you can’t see the difference between artificial intelligence and regular brain creativity,” Edmonson said.
But other experiments fizzled.
“We’re funnier than AI,” Edmonson said after a failed experiment with jokes created by artificial intelligence. “The only thing funny about that is it was so bad. There are limitations we didn’t anticipate.”
And even when AI came up with something good, the class found the human touch could make it better.
“We continue to be surprised at how much we prefer to use our own brains,” she said.
Discoveries such as that have led to deeper in-class discussions about the role of artificial intelligence in our lives in general, Edmonson said.
“The students have been doing some serious mining of their own psyches,” she said. “The discussions reveal so much about what people think about so many other things: free speech, privacy, even gender relations and relationships.”
So after all the work, will AI be the next big thing in entertainment?
As always, the viewers — and their laughter or tears — will be the judge.
“I’m so proud of the students,” Edmonson said. “But ultimately, the audience gets to decide which skits they like the most.”
Follow me at facebook.com/matthew.j.palm or email me at mpalm@orlandosentinel.com. Find more entertainment news and reviews at orlandosentinel.com/entertainment.
