Being both a keen science fiction fan, and a comedy fan, this melding of the two genres was of great initial interest to me. The set-up was of a big projection screen in the middle of the space, a cute little teddy-bear-sized robot called Alex on one side, and a human operator on a computer on the other. Kraftwerk-influenced synthesiser music was played. Lots of CGI graphics flickered across the screen, reminding us that we are in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and we should be awed by the incredible things that it can potentially do, especially in the Arts. Then six energetic humans – professional comedy improvisers, and very good ones – bounced into the space, and the impro began.
This is going to sound harsh, but someone has to break it to Alex. He has no talent.
The premise was that Alex was one of the comedy improvisers. At the beginning, the humans directly interacted with Alex as a robot, and Alex answered back as a robot. Alex was seemingly listening to the performers via a microphone, and then choosing answers from AI- generated text options. First problem: Alex had a very sluggish sense of pace, and without pace, comedy dies. Big pauses followed every cue. The humans tried to cover it up, but it was a handicap.
It then went a bit cyborg. The little robot was ignored. Now a human had an earpiece, and took on Alex’s lines. The humans were interacting with each other, and I guess the idea was that Alex would be so seamless, we wouldn’t even notice which human was wearing the earpiece.
Alex got even more slow and clunky, leaving unlucky humans to sort of make gargling noises in delay as they waited for the next feed. Alex did not listen to other performers, and was a bit of a blocker. Alex generally ignored audience prompts altogether after the first couple of sentences. And the text that Alex was coming out with was just mediocre word-salad. Alex had no wit, no imagination, no idiosyncrasy, no timing – in short, if he had been human, he would have failed the audition in the first fifteen seconds.
Twice during the performance he shut down altogether. The computer operator was bent frantically over the screen, trying to get it fixed, and the humans went into some AI-free comedy improvisation to fill in the gap. They were good performers, and pleased the audience.
The bits that did work were the two occasions where AI-generated visual art were used. One scene was set around screenwriters pitching to a Hollywood studio, and the other was a European professor giving a TED talk about the feelings of robots. Both times Alex had to create art on the screen, and the humans improvised their dialogue around it. AI art is laughable, and the humans had plenty to work with.
The final scene was where all the humans wore earpieces, and went around improvising lines to a new poem about revenge. One of the humans was secretly being Alex. It was a dramatic poem, and drama is easier to fudge than comedy: – in fact, I’m not sure why Improbotics aren’t working with something like television soap opera. A couple of humans deliberately gave confused, robotic performances; and one human gave a polished flourish of every line like Laurence Olivier. The computer operator said this was a Turing Test, and asked the audience to choose who they thought was Alex. The audience chose wrong: – it was the Laurence Olivier performer. But in fairness, that was cheating.
One day we will be bowing down before our AI overlords, pleading for the existence of the human race. But judging from this show, we are going to be needing human comedy performers – and human comedy writers – for a while yet.
Reviewer - Thalia Terpsichore
on - 22.7.23
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