An experimental play will be staged in Dublin tomorrow night which will involve actors performing a script generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
The show, entitled 'PL-AI', will see audiences in Tallaght's Civic Theatre choose the play's genre, theme, setting, characters and plot points.
The suggestions will be fed into ChatGPT - a powerful artificial intelligence system that instantly produces a script for a play that the actors on stage have never seen before.
They perform the lines live as they appear on screens in front of them.
The show was created by Irish playwright Niall Austin.
"By putting the audience in control of the play development, we're allowing them to gain a deeper understanding of how story-arcs are formed and how a play evolves over time," Mr Austin said.
"With the help of AI we can create a performance that's both unique and educational," he added.
But, as a playwright, is he worried that the technology will one day replace him?
"I like to see it as a tool but I don't see it putting me out of business anytime soon - it is a very entertaining experience and it is a great enabler for me to be able to create this project," Mr Austin said.
The cast are busy with last-minute rehearsals but they can only do so much preparation as they have no idea what the final script will look like.
"Before we started rehearsing this morning, we were nervous about what AI would mean for the future of theatre and writers, we are not nervous anymore," said actor Gene Rooney.
"The quality of the writing is a bit bonkers - characters end up being their own mothers and being married to themselves!" she added.
ChatGPT has attracted a lot of attention since its launch in November 2022 as it can provide fast, human-like responses to questions and is also able to write essays, jokes, poetry and, in this case, stage scripts.
Tomorrow night's performance of 'PL-AI' is booked out but if the experiment is a success there will be more shows and they make take it on the road.
And if the play gets bad reviews, they can always blame the scriptwriter.
