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Im ambivalent about having used these tools, even to criticize them, she wrote.
I doubt Ill do it again.
Ambivalence isnt easy for the soul, but oh, how good it is for theater.
How can we both know and not know at the same time?
It all comes from somewhere else.
Ah, but Im not stealing anything.
Im just borrowing this stuff, just like when you borrow a book from the library.
Going to the library isnt a crime, is it?
I: The Hyperindustrial Epoch … She has constructed her lecture entirely out of quotations, collaged fragments of everything from academic tomes to tweets.
Dorsen is doing what AI does.
She is trawling and amalgamating.
She is imitating the imitator.
(Thats Gregg Lambert,The Elements of Foucault.)
How long must all this have taken her?
We dont know how the story ends.
So Dorsen has asked GPT-35 for a grand finale.
(Some end in celebration, some in massacre.)
Murky, atonal music swells into collections of chords that resembles human moans.
Or rather,is beinggenerated, in the moment, over and over again.
Were not listening to pre-recorded sound cues, or watching pre-programmed text play out on that screen.
Whenever the masks begin to speak, Dorsen turns and listens.
Like us, she is hearing something shes never heard before.
Like us, she becomes a curious audience member, capable of surprise, anxiety, boredom.
At first, the masks are mesmerizing.
Then, of course, one starts to become afraid.
What have we done?
And even more pressingly, what shall we do?
Simon Critchley argues that that second question sits at the heart of every Greek tragedy.
And while the circumstances Dorsen presents inPrometheus Firebringermight make its weight seem crushing, she doesnt leave it unanswered.
Because as the masks keep talking, something weirdly wonderful happens: You get bored.
They start to repeat themselves.
They rhyme sky with try one too many times.
I do not know that GPT-35 and its progeny of evils will not destroy the world.
Prometheus Firebringeris at Polonsky Shakespeare Center through October 1.
