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.
More here.
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