Ronald K. Fried at The Millions: McNeal, the new play by Ayad Akhtar, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Disgraced, focuses on an egocentric, self-destructive white male novelist, played by Robert Downey, Jr. The fictional Jacob McNeal—think Mailer or Roth at their worst—wins the Nobel Prize early in the play, but he’s guarding a secret: his latest novel was composed with an uncredited coauthor, an AI chatbot. The production, which considers the controversial notion that artificial intelligence might be a useful creative tool, closes on November 24 after a nearly sold-out run at Lincoln Center. Despite a largely negative critical reception, the show has touched a nerve, which in my view is one of the jobs of a serious writer.
I talked with Akhtar about his new play, the future of AI, and why he dislikes the advice to “show, don’t tell.”
Ronald K. Fried: When did you first think you could write something dramatic about A.I.?
Ayad Akhtar: February of ‘23. GPT had been live for about three months. And it was already clear to me that the future was going to be seriously impacted. And by April of ‘23, I saw a few things in Hollywood that shocked and astonished me. It was clear to me that the technology was far more powerful than we realized from a story point of view, and it was just a matter of time before this technology was going to start affecting the production of writing, creative writing.
Which of course it now is. There was an article in the Hollywood Reporter that came out in June about how everybody is using AI but they’re not talking about it.
RKF: When I heard about AI, my first impulse was to dismiss it.
AA: Yeah that’s what’s going on now. People in the creative industries understandably, but many of us have our heads buried in the sand about what’s coming.
RKF: Do you think that taking a nuanced view of A.I.—and ending the play with a Shakespearian-style speech written with assistance from AI—touched a nerve?
AA: I think that oddly maybe you’re right, and maybe I didn’t quite fully get that. I have a friend at the Atlantic who saw the play early, early on who said, “My God what are you doing? You’re basically saying that it’s okay to use AI to write.” And I said, “I’m trying to figure out what it means that it’s in our lives. And what it means as a writer that this technology is increasingly front and center in our society.” I think that it’s naïve to think that it’s not. It’s real, it’s happening.
RKF: Did you see McNeal as a cautionary tale?
AA: Yes. I have a friend who saw it and said a wonderful thing about the play. He said, “It’s about yesterday, today, and tomorrow.” And I think that’s exactly right. It’s about literary values and a literary culture of yesterday which is giving way to a world of today, both of which are becoming increasingly within the shadows of tomorrow. And by yesterday, I mean values of language, values of form, values of a certain kind of aesthetic meaning, and a certain kind of aesthetic pleasure… and values of today which are about issues of identity and who holds power. And those aesthetic issues are much less front and center. And what’s coming tomorrow, which we don’t even know, because it’s automated.
More here.
