Robert Downey Jr. and Brittany Belisaire McNeill, In Vivian Beaumont.
Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

Here’s an AI prompt: Write me a vehicle for a movie star intent on making a “serious” Broadway debut. Let’s say he’s a veteran of over a decade of superhero movies, so we want a character there that matches his personality and a theme that comes with some contemporary relevance. Perhaps because he played a tech genius on screen, we asked him to wrestle with the cutting edge of technology on stage. He’s also acclaimed as a dramatic actor, which means we need to weigh in on him, so let’s delve into some heavy themes: addiction, suicide, adultery, family trauma, and, well, those real “big man problems.” For, a pinch. of suspicion.

If you plugged this prompt into a larger language model like ChatGPT, it might spit out a bit. McNeillthough you can save the climate a few gulps of processing power and visualize the thing yourself. Either way, the end product, written by Ayad Akhtar and directed by Lincoln Center Theater go-to, Bartlett Sher, is algorithmically intelligible based on past inputs. Robert Downey Jr., on a beach vacation between being Iron Man, Winning an Oscar for Oppenheimerand then return to the CGI fold to play Dr. Doomis to star in New York as a famous writer named Jacob McNeil or, rather, to stand in the middle of the vast Vivienne Beaumont stage, directly beneath the projection of a giant iPhone screen (sci-fi natural Design Michael Yeargan and Jack Barton, and Barton did the estimates). As we meet McNeil, he’s in the middle of a liver checkup where his doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles, underused here but always nice to see) is telling him to stop drinking. McNeal pays little attention to this and is upset when she gets the call. The iPhone indicates that the date is early October, the time of year he dreads because he doesn’t win the Nobel Prize.

The huge phone screen introduces another angle. McNeill Working: If the events of the play are possibly generated by an algorithm, they probably seem intended to be. Before we meet McNeil, we hear him typing on this phone, asking a chatbot who will win the Nobel, a conversation projected on stage. When McNeill wins – it’s not a spoiler. The announcement takes place within the first 15 minutes – he admits he had a rough draft of his acceptance speech but says he didn’t like it. When his agent (Andrea Martin, bouncing around the stage trying to muster enough comic energy to escape the play’s container) suggests he sign a rider to his contract for his next novel, In order to confirm that he did not use any LLM, he became embarrassed. Is McNeill using these programs to write his books? Akhtar wants to ask us. And do we care? As they do so, Sher and Akhtar bring to mind the surreal tang of AI-generated content, both narratively and aesthetically. (Though I think they should have gone the extra mile and cast an actor with a sixth finger.)

Before we get to the big questions of ethics and contract law, there’s the central performance you’re here to see: MacNeil, unsurprisingly, becomes a Tony Stark analog, still an arms dealer. has moved from Great American. Author (with a Jewish mother and a Catholic father and raised in Texas, so basically in the Roth/Delillo/McCarthy blender). He has earned the accolade of legends about Reagan and Goldwater. He is prickly about his heritage, his reputation for not understanding women, and the damage to his relationships in the name of his art. Downey captures McNeil’s charms well – clapping when McNeil delivers professorial tirades about showboating, Shakespeare and Saul Bellow – but struggles to lack subtlety. An extended scene between MacNeil and his son (Rafi Guvron, Lost at Sea) that revolves around their differing memories of MacNeil’s dead wife takes place in a stark recreation of a country lodge. , with lame and half-hearted references to Chekhov. . You better believe someone is polishing a gun. The lion has Downey and Gavron walking in awkward circuits around the living area, talking, while the ghostly figure of MacNeil’s wife passes behind their windows. It’s all in the form of a serious drama, yet there’s no grip, no haste.

Akhtar is a synthetic dramatist interested in dissecting the vast system, however America’s relationship with Islam or Financial marketsBut his writing about AI is frustratingly unfussy, instead falling into familiar tropes and arguments. Akhtar took this stand in an interview on the advent of technology. The Atlantic Ocean“I’m also certainly not making any claims about whether it’s good or bad. I just want to understand it, because it’s coming. As much as McNeil worries about how A.I. has produced many tons. The word slipthe play itself leans more in the direction of what Akhtar imagines the possibilities of the technology: he compares the work of the language learning model to Shakespeare, who himself download the input of the banal Elizabethan plays. What was it that they would know? “King Lear,” and output one of the greatest tragedies ever written. Thought may be, to garble Anna Karenina In a bot-like way, that all plagiarism is the same – but this blurs the idioms of art and indeed technology. Art is theft, sure, but some of it is transformative, intentional, and personal, while other theft is procedural, for the purpose of idle entertainment and shareholder value. I don’t think LLM can do the former, and it’s silly to take the exaggerated, apocalyptic marketing language of Sam Altman types at face value. McNeil leads to. LL.M. is realized. Just different from a human. We don’t have to pretend that those two processes lead to the same end – and there is plenty of material in looking at the ways in which models of mind and language operate differently. For his game Prometheus FirebringerAnnie Dorson had a computer program complete a missing Greek tragedy while she painstakingly gave a speech about her work that consisted entirely of quotations from other works. on film, The BeastA very French-style hopping hybrid of David Lynch and Henry James, it traps the characters in an inhuman script created for them and thrillingly plays on the friction between what a machine thinks a person wants and what they want. Sometimes a little different. Confusion that shapes their true feelings and motivations. And buried in a corner of streaming television, there it is. Mrs. Daviswhich imagines a world run by a god-like AI program that thinks it’s doing well but takes inhuman shortcuts (the show also joked that the program was originally intended to sell Buffalo Wild Wings). There is also much to analyze about the socio-economic conditions that may encourage the spread of AI generated word slopeand it was disappointing that Akhtar, who elsewhere looked more closely at the bottom of the system, avoided it. McNeill The thorny downsides of LLMs: enormous energy consumption, copyright infringement, corporations’ desire to cut labor costs. I don’t think it’s likely that LLMs will start creating art like great human works; It seems more plausible that the forces of capital would pressure us not to care about difference. Slap a recognizable name in the middle of something sick and people will still pay top dollar for it, speaking from hypothetical experience.

McNeillHis whimsical ramblings about art and technology might strike with greater force if the actual drama surrounding them had more tension. The human dynamics Akhtar and Sher hang it all on are that they never get past: MacNeil encounters a cadre of women, including Martin’s assistant (Saisha Talwar), a terrifying An underprepared magazine journalist (Brittany Belisaire) and a New York ex-wife are involved. Times Books Editor who is clearly based on Pamela Paul (Melora Hardin). In her exchanges with them, they do little more than absorb her sarcasm about everything from Annie Ernaux’s work to Harvey Weinstein. If McNeill To tell us that a great artist—especially a great man, for that matter—is a unique force in the universe requires a more nuanced creation of that man. But at the opposite end, what if the play wants to suggest that AI can offer a substitute for a figure that is equal in stature? Well, there’s also the rendering issue. Later in the production, we see a giant Wizard of Oz-style A projection of a “Jacob McNeil digital composite” that mimics Downey’s face, leaving it sallow and clay-like – contrary to the script, which suggests that the deepfake should appear “as if a computer image of emotion” is delivering levels that we wouldn’t imagine being able to do.” Deepfake credits AGBO, a studio based The Avengers The Russo brothers direct, and it feels like a product demonstration stuck in the middle of a play.

Then, at the very end, Akhtar has AI step into the role of Shakespeare himself. Downey ends the play with a farewell speech in imitation of Prospero. gave The Tempestwhich Akhtar says he created after spending a lot of time testing chatbots with just the right inputs. That in itself sounds like creative work, but for Akhtar, something is going on: “I wanted the final speech to have a quality of magic that was akin to wonder… I’ve sometimes felt when I I’ve seen the language being created. When this speech was presented on the screen, there were really oohs and aahs over it Finds some sophisticated rhymes and guesses at Shakespeare’s poetic register but, in my most human critical opinion, without any striking imagery or wit: it’s just a gun.

McNeill is at the Lincoln Center Theater..