Seattle Based The Feast Theatre Company Casts ChatGPT in Latest Production

The Feast theater company is set to stage Elmer Rice’s 1923 play The Adding Machine in a new production titled The Adding Machine: A Cyborg Morality Play. The show began performances on September 12th, at The Lee Center for the Arts on Seattle University’s campus. Performances run through October 6th, 2024.

The Seattle Times reports that the production integrates generative artificial intelligence into its scenic and costume design. It also employs chatbot tools, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, to create characters that interact with the play’s five human actors. Throughout the performance, actors will prompt the AI tools onstage and receive responses via text or voice in real time. While approximately 80% of the play's text remains fixed, the remaining portions require the cast to improvise during these AI interactions.

"[The play] is a really interesting look at what happens when technology is moving faster than we’re comfortable with," said Ryan Guzzo Purcell, The Feast’s founding artistic director and director of the show. "I’m interested in the way that tech intersects with capitalism, intersects with culture. And I think AI is clearly the most groundbreaking moment right now—it’s part of something big and complicated and important for people in Seattle to think about and reckon with and figure out how we feel about it."

Purcell acknowledges concerns about AI's potential to exploit workers and its ecological implications due to massive energy use. "It was very important to us that the way we budgeted this show, the way we hired artists is not changed from the way we would be working [if] we weren’t incorporating AI," he said. "That concern is real, and there are ways people can use this to take shortcuts and not hire artists. That’s not our goal."

The Feast, formerly known as The Williams Project, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. The company has consistently aimed to offer a living wage, currently paying actors $825 a week, which is higher than most similarly sized nonprofit theaters in the area.

Purcell does not anticipate The Feast becoming a more technologically focused theater company or using AI more frequently. "These changes [to the script] kind of explode certain moments to look at what it means when a machine is doing something that a human is used to thinking of as a human activity," he said. "None of it is like, ‘AI did this and now it’s set.’ Hopefully the audience is constantly watching the process of AI making something, because it makes mistakes, it has weird biases, it has problems."