Improbotics

What do words like ‘art’, ‘creativity’ and ‘humour’ mean in the era of smart technology and self-learning algorithms? Can a robot ever make theatre and if so, what does this non-human theatre look like? Let’s see what Alex – the robot of Improbotics – makes of it.

Although our robot starts off by performing in the show, the Improbotics players take it one step further rather quickly. All performers are wearing an earpiece with which they can receive Alex’s lines directly into their ears. When Alex takes control of the show like an invisible director and starts puppeteering one of the players as a ‘cyborg’, the audience sometimes doesn’t even know who is controlled by artificial intelligence and who is using their own free will to speak.

Improbotics was developed by computer scientists Piotr Mirowski (UK) and Kory Mathewson (Canada). They built an artificially intelligent chatbot based on models of how language works. These models are created by a computer learning on huge amounts of text with 1,5 billion parameters and a dataset of 8 million webpages. This software can create text by predicting words based on all the previously used words. By finetuning these models on the subtitles of more than 100,000 movies, Alex can not only generate words into sentences, but also talk in dialogues.