Roll Over Shakespeare: ChatGPT Is Here
Sitting in Lincoln Center awaiting the curtain for Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal—a much anticipated theater production starring Robert Downey Jr., with ChatGPT in a supporting role—I mused how playwrights have been dealing with the implications of AI for over a century. In 1920—well before Alan Turing devised his famous test and decades before the 1956 summer Dartmouth conference that gave artificial intelligence its name—a Czech playwright named Karel Čapek wrote R.U.R.—Rossum’s Universal Robots. Not on