Press Release
The Answering Machine – Artistic-scientific research project on AI and theatre improvisation launched
The project The Answering Machine has begun with its first artistic-research lab at TU Dresden and has already conducted an initial experimental performance at the university theatre, die Bühne. The project focuses on artificial intelligence—specifically language models—and their interaction with humans. In the artistic component, professional actors improvise with various chatbots to generate a dialogue, a scene, or a story. Surrounded by extensive technical equipment and measurement devices, this co-creativity is challenging, but the setting allows for variation in the parameters of the dialogue.
In the first artistic-research lab, the audience experienced one chatbot delivering poetic yet disruptive contributions that challenged its human counterpart—much to the audience’s delight. On another occasion, the AI behaved more conventionally, contributing banal or unoriginal statements that appeared trivial to the audience. The underlying question of these artistic experiments is how much a machine should “meet” or “violate” the expectations of a human interlocutor to be perceived as a genuine counterpart, or even as a source of artistic inspiration.
The Answering Machine brings together four scientific disciplines: psychology (Prof. Scherbaum, TUD), theatre studies (Dr. Lösel, Zurich University of the Arts), computational linguistics (Prof. Kuhn, University of Stuttgart), and media studies (Prof. Marschall, University of Tübingen). Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, the project started this summer and will collect insights over the next four years on human-machine co-creativity, study humans in social interaction with chatbots, and generate artistic outputs in the form of theatre performances to foster a societal dialogue on relevant aspects of artificial intelligence.
The first official performance will take place on March 25 at die Bühne, the TU Dresden theatre, before the project’s results are presented in the coming years in the cities of Tübingen, Stuttgart, and Zurich.