Midway through Ayad Akhtar's new play McNeal, a deepfake appears of Robert Downey Jr., who stars as the title character. The image is as unsettling as it is underwhelming—failing to provoke a suspension of disbelief. Yet the animation (manufactured by the studio AGBO) is not entirely out of place in a work that often seems more like a simulacrum of a play than the red-blooded real thing.
On the day McNeal opened at Lincoln Center Theatre, Akhtar made a somewhat shocking admission in an interview with The Atlantic: He enlisted AI in writing part of the play. As he told The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, 'I wanted some part of the play to actually be meaningfully generated by ChatGPT or some large language model-Gemini, Claude. I tried them all.'
One critic even made the misleading claim that 'the script is 0 percent AI.' To be fair, McNeal doesn't go out of its way to dodge these suspicions. Its set is as sleek as an iPhone and makes the audience feel as if they're trapped in an infernal computer program.
McNeal begins with an invocation to AI. On a live-feed projection that resembles the screen and blinking cursor of ChatGPT, the question appears: 'Who will win the Nobel Prize in Literature this year?' When the software declines to make predictions about the likelihood of the play's titular protagonist winning, we hear a voice denouncing it as a 'soulless, silicon...suck-up.'
Collection
[
|
...
]