AI: When a Robot Writes a Play

The Czech Centre London has partnered with Prague’s Švanda Theatre and theaitre.com to present to the UK public an innovate project entitled ‘AI: When a Robot Writes a Play’ created by a team of computer scientists and drama experts led by a computational linguist.

The play, telling a story of joy and sorrow of everyday life from a robot’s point of view, is composed of dialogues generated by artificial intelligence to celebrate 100th anniversary of the premiere of Czech playwright Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. in which the word ‘robot’ was first used.

The 60-minute play will be performed in Czech with English subtitles and followed by a debate with artificial intelligence and theatre experts which will seek to answer the question of whether a robot can write a theatre play and thus pass the most difficult Turing test to date. The debate will be translated into English for international audiences.

The event will be streamed live on the Czech Centre London’s Facebook page and on www.theaitre.com

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Tomáš Studeník, Czech radical innovator, came up with the idea to celebrate the centenary of the premiere of Čapek's play, originally staged in Prague in January 1921, by replacing Čapek by artificial intelligence as the playwright. The project was created in cooperation with the Švanda Theatre, the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University and the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. The aim has been to explore how artificial intelligence actually performs in a human creative discipline and how much it is able to create a usable theatrical script.

Drama expert David Košťák who, together with computer scientists, oversaw the entire process, reveals the beginning of the project when the language model was given basic parameters: who and where and two introductory replicas. These were then further developed by the computer. But as a lifeless beginner playwright, the robot needed help from humans. ‘Sometimes it swapped female and male characters or clung to something irrelevant so the dialogue lost its meaning. And there is one more obstacle the robot is having difficulties with so far - the subtext. The play is not only about what the character says, but also about what he or she actually thinks’, says Košťák.

Will computer programmes completely replace human playwrights one day? ‘It doesn't look like it yet, but it could help authors in the near future’, concludes David Košťák.

Project website: www.theaitre.com

Partners of the project: THEaiTRE, TA CR (The project TL03000348 THEaiTRE: Artificial Intelligence as the author of the play is co-financed with the state support of the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic within the ÉTA Program 3), Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, CEE Hacks, Prg.ai, DAMU, The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, Czech Centers, Prague, Prague 5 (The theatre is a stage of the capital city of Prague and is supported by the Municipality of Prague 5).