Whose line of code is it anyway? Artificial intelligence has joined a group of improv actors in a live stage performance, providing a novel twist on the Turing test 鈥� a test of machine intelligence.
AI has written , poetry and even jokes before, but Kory Mathewson at the University of Alberta and Piotr Mirowski wanted a robot to go where no robot had gone before: comedy theatre.
They based their work on the Actor鈥檚 Nightmare, an improvised performance where actors are forced to make incongruous lines fit believably into a constantly evolving scene. 鈥淥ne actor might be reading War and Peace, and the second has an objective to ask for a divorce, and keep the Jaguar,鈥� says Mirowski. 鈥淥bviously War and Peace and an acrimonious divorce don鈥檛 really make sense together,鈥� and this is where the potential for comedy lies.
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In Mirowski and Mathewson鈥檚 version, Improbotics, three actors appear on stage 鈥� the free will human, the puppet and the cyborg. Only the first can devise their own lines; the puppet is fed lines through an earphone from a human off-stage, and the cyborg is fed lines generated by an AI called A.L.Ex.
The algorithm powering A.L.Ex is trained on movie subtitles, giving it a sense of dialogue. However, a curator is also on hand to input the scene prompts and select the best responses to send to the cyborg stage performer.
The Turing test, devised by mathematician Alan Turing, requires a machine to convince an interrogator it is human. For an on-stage version, at the end of Improbotics the audience had to guess who was the human, the puppet and the cyborg.
AI still has some work to do. The audience always guessed the identity of the AI-controlled improviser, but in two out of six shows some thought there was actually a second AI performer.
鈥淚t was like performing with a very new improvisor with strange impulses,鈥� reported one actor. 鈥淣ervous and unpredictable鈥�, remarked another. A drama school graduate himself, Mirowski describes the cyborg actor as being 鈥渢he most adversarial stage partner possible鈥�.
Mathewson and Mirowski will be taking the show to Canada in the new year, where they will perform a run of shows in at the Rapid Fire Theatre in Edmonton. 鈥淲e鈥檙e absolutely aiming for Broadway,鈥� says Mathewson. 鈥淲e just need an agent.鈥�
搁别蹿别谤别苍肠别:听
