Can innovations in AI not only transform the stories theatre-makers tell, but the way we tell them?

Well, it’s been a minute! 1 pandemic and 2 children later, I’m thrilled to be back in the driving seat at Any One Thing. In my absence, my colleagues Paul Farnell and Annie Walsh have been working on a browser-based performance platform and a deep-dive personalisation tool, both of which promise to keep Any One Thing at the forefront of making innovative, intimate theatrical experiences.

Now back from my second maternity leave, I’m throwing myself into a research zone, keen to catch up on what’s hot in both the software and theatre worlds.

My interest’s been piqued by both the huge advances in Generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and by Fuel’s A Dead Body In Taos, a thriller by David Farr which probes how AI can alter our understanding of life and death. Both playing with ChatGPT and seeing Farr’s new show have led me down a rabbit warren of super cool innovations in the AI world and have got me thinking about how the theatre industry might adopt them.

A Dead Body in Taos has many similarities to piece’s we at Any One Thing have created. Souvenir also explored digital legacy; Recollection captured audience data and (fictionally) fed an artificial intelligence system; and Recall — an online piece we did some R&D on last year — saw its protagonist’s identity stolen by a computer system (one might even call it an ‘avatar-cum-ChatGPT-esque chatbot’).

But have we missed a trick?

We’ve written AI generated characters, explored the complicated ethics surrounding human-AI relationships and probed the darker intentions of data-hungry neural networks, but A Dead Body in Taos nor Souvenir nor Recollection nor Recall attempts to use AI in the making of them.

It’s time us theatre-makers consider the creative potential of this rapidly developing field. It feels a bit scary, dare I say, even a bit dirty. What if I stumble across a tool or a piece of a software that is going to cut theatre-folk out of the job market? According to former Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney “alongside its great benefits, every technological revolution mercilessly destroys jobs and livelihoods — and therefore identities — well before the new ones emerge.” This industry is competitive enough, without having to compete with smart computer systems.

We’re constantly evolving our storytelling methods in parallel with technological advancement.

But I don’t think it has to be as black and white as that. Theatre has always embraced technological innovation. From the first roofed playhouses of 16th century London, to the use of limelight to illuminate players in the mid-19th century; from the introduction of the counterweight rigging system a few decades later, to the invention of stage automation systems in the 1980s; from the wide-use of projection mapping in the 2010s, to the explosion of online platforms used and created at the height of the pandemic, we’re constantly evolving our storytelling methods in parallel with technological advancement. Artificial Intelligence might just be the next toolset at our creative disposal.

Over the next few weeks I am going to explore a range of AI tools which can be used at different stages in the creative process of making modern theatre. From AI actors to AI-generated text and other media, I’ll be sharing how I get on.

It’s good to be back.