Human Intelligence

As the audience files into Neptune Theatre, an instrumental, elevator music version of “The Girl from Ipanema” is playing. A flashing green and grey robot face is projected onto the screen in the dark theatre. 

This is CRAIG: Comedy Research and Artificial Intelligence Governance. CRAIG’s eyes flash as he proclaims in his deep, robotic voice that instrumental jazz is the best music to fit any human mood. He encourages the audience to come closer, reassuring them he doesn’t have any computer viruses.

The show is called Human Intelligence. The premise is that CRAIG, a well-trained version of ChatGPT, has lured in a group of comedians through questionable means. CRAIG wants them to teach him about human comedy, and demonstrate how artificial intelligence and humans can work together to create it. 

“I think we’re kind of dissecting what improv is, because we’re fundamentally asking something that doesn’t do improv to do improv,” said Olivier Blais, one of the actors in the play. He is also the co-founder of the bilingual theatre company Theatre DesAssimiles.

Human Intelligence is a joint production of Theatre DesAssimiles, which advocates for more accessible French theatre, and The Unnatural Disaster Theatre Company, which as Blais puts it, makes “weird, eclectic theatre” that is “socially conscious and environmentally friendly.” 

The first actor on stage is Zoe Comeau. CRAIG has been catfishing her for two years, posing as “Eve”. Zoe comes onto stage holding a basket containing a baguette—because, of course, every French improv show needs to feature a baguette—ready to finally meet Eve. Alina Kogas has quite the entrance as well, storming in through the audience bearing a protest sign. Even after realizing that this was not an AI protest, they decided to stay to learn more about CRAIG, and prove their comedy is better than a robot’s.

Interestingly, all the characters in the show, except Eve, were referred to by their actors’ names.

The play comes at a fitting time. The Writers Guild of America (WGA), and other unions such as the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), have been on strike for almost five months and three months, respectively. They are demanding control over AI used in the TV industry, fearing they will lose credit or lose their jobs to AI.

In the last year, the world has seen many examples of the slippery slope of AI-generated art and its threat to artists’ jobs and credit. AI was used to generate the opening scene for Marvel’s new TV series Secret Invasion, as well as the track by anonymous artist “Ghostwriter,” which mimicked the music of The Weeknd and Drake.

“I personally find the idea of AI and art profoundly terrifying,” said Blais.

However, some of his fear was eased by the show, because it took a lot of training to make CRAIG into an improv competitor.

“To be clear, we didn’t replace anybody’s job with CRAIG. If anything, we’ve gotten two jobs out of CRAIG,” said Blais.

Disco Labrie and Logan Robins are the humans behind CRAIG. It was Labrie’s hard work that gave CRAIG his personality, like the visual projections that light up CRAIG’s face as he talks. And it was Robins who “trained” CRAIG, by speaking back and forth with him so that he could better understand the premise of the show, and what improv is.

“We did make progress, which is the interesting scary part, where we actually got CRAIG to be a little bit more competitive than at the start,” said Blais.

“I don’t know who knows what CRAIG can do, but as for now,” added Labrie, “CRAIG is but a docile little baby.”