It’s not difficult to come up with an adjective to describe artificial intelligence. Everything is from useful to scary. But is that interesting?
Central Floridians will have the opportunity to celebrate the upcoming UCF at the Arts Festival at the Performing Arts Center in Downtown Orlando.
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The show, entitled “AI Cabaret: Late Night with Artificial Intelligence,” came from “Teacher Curiosity.”
“Can we use AI to create art?” she recalled the faculty debating. “Can it help us creativity?”
The topic of Edmonson, a technical theater class member, a mixture of undergraduate and alumni, sparked the challenge.
“I’m a huge fan of emerging technology,” said Gilbloom, a UCF Junior class studying theater design and technology, focusing on theater design and projection design. “But I was a bit skeptical at first.”
Others involved were skeptical.
“It wasn’t necessarily a positive reception,” Edmonson said.
The students were also worried.
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“I saw them on the phone and I think they love technology, but this was approached with fear,” she said.
Bloom said fear is justified, but not for the reason you might think.
“There’s risks, but it’s not something people expect. It won’t take over the world,” he said. But because of the way AI “learns” it absorbs and expands all the biases, stereotypes and other human failures found on the Internet.
“We’re creating this kind of feedback loop and exacerbating all the bias,” Bloom said. “AI is trained to make us happy. It is not trained to tell the truth. It is trained to tell us what we want to hear. It is a much more subtle danger.”
Early efforts by the class included in devising scenes by generating scripts in AI.
“It’s actually the most interesting thing we did,” Edmonson said. “The plot was very basic. I wanted to push beyond that.”
So, what will happen at the show on April 12th?
For one, the audience will see performers interact with AI on stage.
“We came up with some ways to do that,” Edmonson said. “It’s weird and wonderful.”
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Within an act, a game show segment where audiences compete to create sentences using AI-generated tokens and a sheet sketch of music where parents try to prove the superiority of a baby AI bot.
Bloom refers to a segment in which audience members use AI chatbots to speed dating. However, his favorite bits include Siri and Alexa, which are now considered less technology.
“They’re not ai, they’re really great in the ‘statement case’,” he said. “If the user says this, you say it.”
He explains to them about the commentators about action Alastarer and Waldorf from The Muppet Show.
“They’ll heckling all the time,” he said.
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Throughout the process, some ideas are more successful than others – if you count humans as success.
“There’s something about the difference between artificial intelligence and normal brain creativity (part of the show),” Edmonson said.
However, other experiments have skyrocketed.
“We’re more interesting than AI,” Edmonson said after failing to experiment with jokes created by artificial intelligence. “The funny thing about that is that it was a very bad thing. There are limitations that we didn’t expect.”
And even when AI came up with something good, the class discovered that human touch could make it better.
“We’re still amazed at how much we like our brains,” she said.
Edmonson said such findings led to deeper in-class discussions about the role of artificial intelligence in our lives.
“The students are doing serious mining of their own mind,” she said. “The discussion reveals so much about what people think about freedom of speech, privacy, gender relations, even relationships, what relationships do.”
So, after all the work, will AI be the next big thing in entertainment?
As always, viewers and their laughter and tears become judges.
“I’m very proud of my students,” Edmonson said. “But in the end, the audience can decide which skit they like most.”
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