The processing of natural language increasingly enables machines with artificial intelligence (AI) to interact as social partners. As a result, new forms of human-machine relationships are emerging—relationships long anticipated by countless fictional narratives but only now becoming the subject of empirical experimentation. “The Answering Machine” is an interdisciplinary project that aims to explore human-AI interactions in cognitive, linguistic, and emotional depth, using the theatre stage as an experimental field for profound, iterative investigations.
Machines, social bots, digital agents, artificial intelligences, or machine learning systems are placed in improvised dialogue with human improvisational theatre actors. In doing so, we vary AI language models to investigate both the specific research questions of the four participating disciplines—psychology, computational linguistics, theatre studies, and media studies—and general phenomena such as anthropomorphization, person perception, and human-machine co-creativity.
Through joint laboratories and public performances, the project brings together technological innovation, artistic research, and critical reflection, fostering a public understanding of AI that transcends the binary dystopian/utopian imagery of common fictional narratives.