Stand-Up, Drama and Spambots:
The Creative World Takes On A.I.
Artificial intelligence has become a subject for people in the art and theater
worlds who are worried about being replaced by it.
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By Erin Griffith
Reporting from San Francisco
Nov. 13, 2024
Inside a curved glass building next to the Golden State Warriors’ arena in San
Francisco, eight cans of Spam with tiny arms whirred to life, tapping out artificial-
intelligence-generated word slop on miniature keyboards. They were part of the
Misalignment A.I. Museum, a gallery dedicated to A.I.-inspired art.
Across town, in the basement of a Lower Haight boutique, a group of tech workers
delivered stand-up comedy sets about programming languages, ChatGPT and
Nvidia’s stock price for Artificially Unintelligent, a tech-themed comedy show.
And a month earlier, on a foggy summer night in San Francisco’s Glen Park
neighborhood, a group of tech workers gathered at a midcentury house being used
as a start-up office for a reading of “Doomers,” a new, ripped-from-the-headlines
play about the weekend that Sam Altman, the chief executive of the start-up
OpenAI, was briefly fired.
A.I. is providing the art and entertainment worlds with plenty to fear, from
potential copyright violations on a global scale to the loss of jobs taken by a
soulless machine. But A.I. is also quickly becoming fodder for the creative
community.
The technology has long been a staple of science fiction, but now, two years into the
boom kicked off by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the issues raised by those movies and
books all feel a little more real. More artists, playwrights and comedians are
finding inspiration in the A.I. technology that’s currently available: its ethical
quandaries, its impact, its risks, its absurdities and even its executives.
The Misalignment A.I. Museum in San Francisco is set to move to a bigger space next year. Loren Elliott
for The New York Times
Audiences are eating it up. “Doomers” is set to have an official run early next year
in New York and San Francisco, after raising funding via Kickstarter. The
Misalignment A.I. Museum, which started in 2023 as an eight-week pop-up, is set
to move into a larger, permanent space in San Francisco’s Mission Bay
neighborhood and reopen in February. And Artificially Unintelligent has become a
monthly event and is seeking to expand into other cities.
Some of the creative work about A.I. is coming from tech industry insiders
laughing at the hype or raising alarms about the dangers. Some of it is coming from
outsiders fascinated by the industry’s intrigue.
A.I. has become a meaty topic for artists to dissect, invoke and mock even as they
fight its use as a tool in their fields. In October, more than 10,000 actors, authors
and musicians signed a letter opposing the use of their works to train A.I. systems.
At least 10 groups, including voice actors, the Recording Industry Association of
America and The New York Times, have sued A.I. companies, claiming the
technology unlawfully used copyrighted work without permission. And many
artists, from graphic designers to movie stars, have expressed concern that the A.I.
could soon replace them.
“It’s definitely a big topic that’s affecting us all, and we should have everyone who
is affected by it be part of the conversation,” said Audrey Kim, the museum’s
founder and curator.
From Misalignment to Marie Antoinette
Audrey Kim, founder and curator of the Misalignment A.I. Museum, started thinking about the impact of
A.I. a decade ago. Loren Elliott for The New York Times
Ms. Kim has been thinking about A.I. for at least a decade, starting when she
worked in operations at Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company now owned by
General Motors. Her colleagues would have lunchtime debates about the role of
A.I. in society. In recent years, as that debate became more mainstream, Ms. Kim
decided that art could be a way to bridge the gap between the people building A.I.
and the rest of us.
Initially her museum, which is a nonprofit supported by donations, focused entirely
on addressing the risks of A.I. But through discussions with people working in tech,
Ms. Kim, realized there was no consensus among techies on what A.I.’s risks to
humanity were, or even a universal understanding about how it worked. So she
shifted to education and asking the big questions.
One exhibit is a phone booth made for conversations with an A.I. version of the
television legend Fred Rogers. The exhibit breaks down all the different pieces of
technology that were used to create it, including the speech-to-text converter that
interprets the visitor’s voice, the A.I. system — called a large language model —
that creates the Fred Rogers-like personality and the text-to-speech model that
simulates his voice, “so it’s not just like this nebulous, vague A.I.,” Ms. Kim said.
An interactive exhibit at the Misalignment A.I. Raymond Yao, who works at the crypto company
Museum. Loren Elliott for The New York Times Coinbase, interacting. Loren Elliott for The New York
Times
A sculpture in the shape of two humans embracing is made of paper clips, evoking
a popular theory of A.I.-induced doom. (Told to make paper clips, an A.I. model
could decide that humans get in the way of making more paper clips and kill them.)
“I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Ms. Kim said of the paper clip apocalypse while
giving a tour of the museum, “but one of the main dangers of A.I. is not having a
stop valve.”
A piece called “Sonosynthesis” features a grand piano that plays A.I.-generated
music in response to close-up images of bacteria. It’s designed to provoke
discussions about who should get the rights to the music: the researchers who built
the A.I., the artists who created the music used to train the A.I. or the scientists
who grew the bacteria that inspired the music.
Many of the pieces, like an A.I. palm reader or a Broomba (a broom on a Roomba
vacuum), are playful. A clown puppet that cries for help in the visitor’s voice is
terrifying.
Other exhibits are purely aesthetic. Ms. Kim unfurled a pair of seven-foot neon
pink and blue tapestries called “Marie Antoinette After the Singularity,” designed
using A.I. tools by the musician Grimes, who has encouraged fans to make A.I.
music using her voice. To create the pieces and advise on the placement of the
crests, Ms. Kim contracted Factum Arte, a group in Madrid whose nonprofit arm
refurbished Henry VIII’s tapestries.
Ms. Kim with tapestries designed by the musician Grimes using A.I. Loren Elliott for The New York Times
Ms. Kim, who embodies the museum’s winking, whimsical spirit on tours,
considers herself a tech optimist. “The future is not set,” she said. “It’s what we’re
doing today that’s going to make that or break that.”
‘Millennials with a ton of power’
Matthew Gasda was inspired to write “Doomers” by last year’s boardroom intrigue at
OpenAI. Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times
“Doomers” takes a different view. Matthew Gasda said he had been inspired to
write the play after following Mr. Altman’s firing on social media last year. The
abrupt ouster set off a public debate over potential dangers of OpenAI’s technology
and whether Mr. Altman was ignoring them.
While researching those conversations, Mr. Gasda, 35, decided that the people
building this new technology were not any more qualified to have debates about its
role in society than anyone else.
“It’s just millennials with a ton of power,” he said.
Mr. Gasda’s previous plays were similarly of the moment. “Zoomers” was about
young people in New York. “Dimes Square” was about the city’s postpandemic
downtown scene. He often stages casual readings of drafts of his scripts, then
collects audience feedback and adapts. He told the audience in San Francisco that
this process might be familiar.
“You all know about beta testing and releasing products that don’t work,” he said to
laughter.
That version of “Doomers” hit on tropes familiar to anyone who has followed tech
culture in recent years: polycules, Waymo, p(doom), ketamine. The characters,
based on Mr. Altman and his peers at OpenAI, had heated ethical debates about
benevolence and abundance. At one point, Mr. Altman’s character (called Seth in
the play) grabs a knife and demands that someone stab him because doing so
would lower the probability of A.I.-induced doom.
Some of the early viewers worked at Anthropic, a rival to OpenAI, and they agreed
with the play’s message that A.I. poses a threat to the world. Mr. Gasda said the
wave of resignations at OpenAI in recent months further validated his thesis.
“I told the actors, ‘I think we’re onto something here,’” he said.
Court jesters
Neal Patel at Artificially Unintelligent, a comedy show about working in tech. Rachael Zahn/Avenue Z
At Artificially Unintelligent, the threat from A.I. was not quite as dire. Onstage, the
host, Neal Patel, surveyed the audience of 120 about their roles in the industry,
cheering on the “value-add engineers” and poking fun at the people with
“nontechnical fake email jobs.” To the founders, he asked, “Why are you here and
not building?”
He joked that A.I. would soon take everyone’s jobs.
Mr. Patel, 24, started his comedy group, Not-So-Daily Stand Up, in part because he
and his fellow techie comedians kept hearing other comedians make jokes about
technology that misunderstood how it worked. The group’s roster of around 55
comedians all have day jobs in tech. (Mr. Patel is an engineer.)
“The credentials back up the jokes,” he said.
Even as A.I. threatens to replace workers, including engineers, Mr. Patel said, a
common theme among his peers is how limited the technology’s abilities actually
are.
“We’re all dealing with the same crap where a nontechnical manager says, ‘Can we
use A.I. for that?’ And we say, ‘No.’ And they say, ‘Try it anyway,’” Mr. Patel said.
Lately, tech companies have invited Mr. Patel’s comedy group to come roast them.
The setup tests whether Silicon Valley’s famous “radical candor” extends to
delicate egos of those at the top. But comedians can get away with saying things
others can’t, Mr. Patel said. “It’s almost like us being a bunch of court jesters.”
Erin Griffith covers tech companies, start-ups and the culture of Silicon Valley from San Francisco. More
about Erin Griffith
