Full Disclosure: The following review was not produced by ChatGPT, the popular AI (artificial intelligence) go-to. On the other hand, author Annie Dorsen’s Prometheus Firebringer has everything to do with AI and with, as the MacArthur Fellow and longtime AI-struck Dorsen dubs it, “algorithmic theater.”
When Dorsen first appears on stage at a table to the side of six Greek tragedy-like masks (no set designer specified), she explains she’s about to deliver an essay (ultimately 45 minutes long, or 45 minutes short) about her decidedly mixed feelings on artificial intelligence.
She goes on to report that she sees a parallel between the benefit/threat AI brings to today’s world and the benefit/threat with which 2,500 years ago Aeschylus dealt in his Prometheus trilogy, wherein Zeus severely punishes Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods and offering it to mankind.
For those who aren’t up to date on Aeschylus, he never completed the three plays, and as Prometheus Firebringer advances, Dorsen (bless her ingenuity!) imagines the third and last part. Actually, she has AI do it for her (bless AI’s ingenuity?).
Is everyone with this so far? If not, don’t despair. Likewise affected is the reviewer, still slow at feeling akin with the AI fervor currently intriguing, exciting, and frightening everybody else around the globe—artists and critics included.
For that reason, the reviewer is turning for helpful description to the production press release, which is as lucid a clue and cue as might be needed for initial comprehension:
“In Prometheus Firebringer, Dorsen uses predictive text model GPT-3.5 (the same model that runs ChatGPT) to generate speculative versions of the missing [Aeschylus] story.” The release goes on to inform, “Dorsen delivers this lecture that draws on a multitude of influences on her art-making and worldview.”
The essay or lecture that Dorsen reads from pages she then discards is entirely constructed of quotes from widely varied commentators. To be precise, she’s written nothing. What she delivers are writings from, among 40 or 50 others, René Descartes, Guy de Maupassant, Roland Barthes, Simon Critchley (Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us),and Susan Sontag.
Slavoj Žižek refers to Donald Rumsfeld noting that “There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things we know that we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know. What he forgot to add was the future fourth term: ‘the unknown knowns,’ things we don’t know that we know.”
When Dorsen, by way of Critchley’s quote, alludes to Rumsfeld, she’s getting around to tragedy in the Aeschylus sense. The idea borrowed from Critchley has her positing that the overarching point of tragedy is this: that “we both know and we don’t know at one and the same time and are destroyed in the process.”
Confused? This reviewer is, and suspects that Dorsen deliberately intends her seemingly catch-as-catch-can essay to be mildly confusing. Another way of phrasing the contention is that she may well want her patchwork essay to reflect her own long-experienced confusion about AI. After all, since 2010 she’s presented six previous performance pieces on the confounding subject.
It appears that what Dorsen is getting at it is this: AI has the same constructive and destructive qualities as fire. (An indisputable fact, no?) And that therefore Prometheus Firebringer is her way of concluding—for the moment, at least—that while appreciating the myriad plusses AI provides, she is also aware of AI’s myriad minuses. She’s not yet prepared to declare herself for or against.
Were a reviewer pressed to bet on which side she favors, he would probably choose “against.” That inclination can be attributed to the other prominent Prometheus Firebringer element, the tragedy that the AI-generated masks represent. Yes, interspersed with the essay is a dramatic AI proposal of what Aeschylus might have had Prometheus and the chorus declaim in that never-to-be final piece.
The Firebringer himself speaks from the large central mask, and the five-strong chorus at the other side of the stage, sounding like bots imitating children, respond. The prevailing gist, which evidently changes from one performance to the next, is that abashed Zeus challenger Prometheus is having second thoughts about his defiant actions. Is he presaging Dorsen’s own AI misgiving? Sounds that way.
There’s brilliance at hand here but such demanding brilliance that an all-fired-up observer pausing to think about what’s just occurred can be distracted from what’s now occurring. Pressed to catch up with Dorsen when she’s discoursing and then when the imagined Aeschylus script is unfolding remains a constant. Maybe that’s just a wearied algorithmic theatergoer’s take, but there it is.
Prometheus Firebringer opened Sept. 19, 2023, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center and runs through Oct. 1. Tickets and information: tfana.org
