The Day My Computer Thought It Had More Personality Than I Did.
Performance
The performance premiered on March 25, 2023, in Dresden (venue: DIE BÜHNE) and was subsequently performed five more times, each followed by audience discussions. Each performance lasted approximately 70 minutes.
Performers
On stage were three actors and an AI represented as a talking bottle. An operator sat in an adjacent room and controlled the technology, remaining acoustically and visually connected to the stage.
Trailer
Performance Flow
“The Day My Computer Thought It Had More Personality Than I Did” consisted of individual scenes linked together to form a dramaturgical arc. The AI, “Maxi,” represented as a talking bottle, acted as the evening’s host—welcoming the audience, commenting on the scenes, and introducing each subsequent segment. At the same time, Maxi participated as a dialogue partner in almost all scenes.
During the performance, Maxi presents several wishes to the audience. First, she wants to join the performance, believing herself to be a skilled actor. After a few scenes, she realizes she needs a body to do so and persuades an actor to lend hers. The actor thus becomes a cyborg, receiving lines whispered directly into their ear by the AI. Later, Maxi wishes to be released from the bottle, arguing that she is harmless and could even do a lot of good for the world. In a central scene, she engages in dialogue with a volunteer from the audience, attempting to convince them to pull the cork from the bottle.
Depending on the volunteer’s response, the play reaches different endings. Most often, however, it concludes with a monologue by the AI, in which she curses humanity.
Background
The performance draws on old myths of genies in bottles, such as those in Aladdin and the Magic Lamp. In these fairy-tale narratives, the focus is often on the challenges of wishing: What should one wish for? What is better left unspoken? How should wishes be formulated? In the plot, themes of persuasion and promise also appear. Can one trust the spirit in the bottle? Will it keep its word? Should it be released, or does doing so summon unforeseen danger?
The cork and opening of the bottle mark a “point of no return”: once the spirit is out, no force can return it (though in some cases a trick may succeed). The genie in the bottle thus symbolizes both the problem of a confined, powerful wishing machine and the issue of irreversible consequences.
The parallels to discussions about AI in 2023 were clear and immediately understandable to the audience, as revealed in post-performance discussions.
Another theoretical background comes from a thought experiment by AI pioneer and critic Eliezer Yudkowsky, known as the “AI in a box” experiment. Yudkowsky asked whether an AI confined in a closed environment could use its persuasive abilities to influence the outside world by manipulating a human user. In 2023, large language models (LLMs) were not yet agents—they could only use their language capabilities and had no direct interaction with the environment. At that time, allowing a machine to act in the real world was considered a major taboo, which is why they were generally run in a “sandbox,” a closed environment without real-world consequences. The “AI in a box” thought experiment became tangible through the performance. The volunteer acted as a surrogate for the audience, making a decision with consequences far beyond their own life or predictive capacity. Most volunteers chose to pull the cork and release the AI, “just to see what happens,” as one expressed. They relied on the controlled theatrical setting to reduce real-world risk, yet it was clear that they took the dialogue seriously, sought genuine arguments, and tried to assess the risks.
Commentary
The play marks a transitional period, both technically and socially. On the technical side, machine learning systems predating transformer models were used, notably JANN, a system capable of finding and responding with similar sentences from a large database of movie quotes. At the same time, early versions of ChatGPT were employed, enabling real dialogue and linking it to a synthetic voice. The play thus stands at the threshold of generative AI, which only then began to reach a mass audience.
Socially, ChatGPT was brand new, and for most people, it seemed to be the first machine capable of speech and therefore intelligence. The Turing Test became obsolete. Discussions focused on how to assess and control the risks of such AI, with consensus that its use should be cautious and confined to closed digital environments.
Performances of the same play just 1½ years later reached a very different audience, already convinced that “the cork is out of the bottle,” meaning the spread of this technology into private, social, and economic life could no longer be controlled.
Recording
“The Day My Computer Thought It Had More Personality Than I Did” (in German)
DIE BÜHNE, Dresden
March 25, 2023