The Hologram in the Mirror:
Dramaturg's Note
The play "The Hologram in the Mirror" foreshadows a world where Artificial Intelligence (AI) creates significant disruption in the arts and literature that are created and consumed by humans. Artists might be discouraged from producing their works, perhaps because of the popularity of AI art which could be produced quickly and cheaply—and completely independent of human action. Artists’ often meager incomes could be further constrained, discouraging talented humans from studying the arts and hampering the gifts of future generations.
While this play is set some time in the future, there is evidence that AI is already having an impact on the arts, yet its potential effects on individual artists and institutions are still unclear.
AI Music, Theater, and Literature
AI is already creating music without human input, while companies like boomy, openai - jukebox, or soundraw, are allowing humans to use AI to create new works with very minimal human guidance. Trained musicians are also using AI to help them curate and perfect their compositions, creating works that would likely be impossible without AI.
Artificial intelligence and music have long been intertwined. Alan Turing built a machine in 1951 that generated three simple melodies. Turing died in 1954, but virtual incarnations of deceased musical artists—like Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse—continue to "create" and "perform" new works based on the digital “imagination” of AI. And new works by AI artists are now being unveiled, opening up a new mode of expression.
Some technologists have built devices which perceive the environment and create novels, poems, and screenplays “inspired” from human works that were assimilated through a type of AI called machine learning. Others have staged musicals written using AI. Some of these works you can find in your local bookstore.
This is already raising questions about who “owns” such works, especially if they’re largely borrowed from others’ music. Experts often can’t tell the difference between these works by AI artists and those created by humans.
What is AI (Artificial Intelligence)?
AI are “…machines that respond to stimulation consistent with traditional responses from humans, given the human capacity for contemplation, judgment, and intention.” Such systems have three qualities that constitute the essence of artificial intelligence: intentionality, intelligence, and adaptability.
Increasingly a topic in the media and public discourse, President Biden recently appointed a new White House "czar" for artificial intelligence to begin discussions with the public about the benefits and risks of AI, as robots can now do complex tasks such as “cleaning up after a nuclear disaster, waxing floors, or pulling barnacles off a ship.”
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Here’s a friendly and fun narrative by Tim Urban to walk you through the concept of AI and its potential implications for our lives.
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And here’s an explanatory video for kids. Also, Steven Speilberg’s film "AI" highlights the dilemmas associated with humans building and interacting with AI.
What is a Turing Test?
The movie “The Imitation Game” is about the life of Alan Turing (portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch). The film shows how Turing devised a test as a way to judge whether an interviewee is a human or a machine capable of demonstrating “artificial Intelligence.”
Turing compared this test to a party game called the "imitation game," in which a woman and a man go to separate rooms while the other guests write questions on note cards. The woman and man type answers and send them back to the rest of the party guests, who must guess the gender of the two separated guests. (Watch this short video which explains the Turing Test.)
In 1950 Turing predicted that by the year 2000 computers would be able to play the Imitation Game so that a judge would only have a 70% chance of guessing correctly whether it was a machine or human. Turing was a bit off in his prediction: it happened in 2014.
AI researchers are making strides, constructing robot faces that can react to human emotion.. Yet It would be a remarkable—and disruptive—feat for humans to create an AI being that could live undetected among us,
Are you a hologram?
“The Hologram in the Mirror” explores an alternative reality theorized by physicists, called the “Holographic Principle.”
