PL-AI

PL-AI time asks real questions of audiences

Games are fun, but interactivity is the opposite of art, says Jason Walsh
Blogs
Image: Civic Theatre

3 March 2023

A new play being performed at the Civic Theatre in Tallaght next Thursday (9 March), PL-AI, combines artificial intelligence (AI) with audience participation to create something that poses a number of questions worth thinking about.

Promotional material from the theatre spells it out thusly:

“PL-AI puts the audience in control of the creative process. Through a moderator, the audience suggests a play’s genre, key plot points, and other details, which are then fed into an AI system. The computer immediately generates a script on the spot, which is then performed impromptu by highly skilled actors.”

I have my questions, but having not seen the play I will reserve judgement for the moment. However, the role of AI in creating art aside, on reading this I was reminded of a quite different question about what technology brings to the table in the arts.

Some years ago, Salman Rushdie caught some not inconsiderable flak for saying that video games were not art. Criticised as a snob, Rushdie’s point was actually subtler than his critics admitted: games were not art, he said, because their interactive nature precludes them from being so.

The audience’s role was not merely that of consumer, he said, but they must be presented with a completed thing.

Speaking to David Cronenberg, Rushdie said: “In the end, a work of art is something which comes out of somebody’s imagination and takes a final form. It’s offered and is then completed by the reader or the viewer or whoever it may be”.

Rushdie was not saying that games were inferior to art in some way, merely that they belonged to some other category of endeavour. Indeed, game is itself a category, and the scramble to have everything, from graphic design to fashion to video games, declared art seems to come down to the belief that the term ‘art’ denotes some exalted status. Clearly this is not the case, and anyone who has ever entered a gallery, bookshop or cinema will know there is plenty of bad art.

In fact, the idea of a play in which the audience has a role in dictating the plot is not entirely new. Numerous plays have asked the audience for their input, amusingly including a quasi-autobiographical one by Jeffrey Archer that saw the audience routinely vote to jail him, but the practice has never become mainstream, for fairly obvious reasons.

Playing a text adventure game, also called interactive fiction, is here an instructive experience, as it lays bare the limitations of interactivity. Today’s games may be several orders of magnitude more sophisticated, but a few hours spent typing Go North and Get Lamp lays bare the fact that what appears to be interactivity is in fact the result of a decision tree. 

It seems, to me at least, that questions over authorship are old hat today. There is certainly a large body of work questioning it and other basic precepts of art. However, when he wrote The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes was not declaring that the reader wrote the text. Similarly, Umberto Eco’s idea of a reader and writer being engaged in an act of collaboration over an ‘open text’ may result in a text being capable of producing an infinite number of interpretations, we still know how to differentiate between the two roles.

All of that said, it is true that one characteristic of art is its ability to make us ask questions. It is not the only characteristic, nor even the primary one, though.

As for interactivity, the greatest of all occurs in our minds.

Read More:


Back to Top ↑

TechCentral.ie