“Do you know what AI is?” a woman asks a young child waiting in line at the Edinburgh Fringe’s Gilded Balloon venue.

If anyone’s been to the Edinburgh Fringe before, you’ll know the city is completely transformed – tourists and locals alike barrage themselves into the tiniest rooms, the dampest caves, for shows they might have never even heard about.

The young child waiting in line to see Artificial Intelligence Improvisation, which is debuting at the Edinburgh Fringe throughout the festival, does not know what AI means, it turns out, and so the woman explains:

“Artificial intelligence – so robots and stuff. A lot of people are very worried it’s going to take their jobs. Not really high end jobs, but a lot of simpler jobs – in ten years’ time, most jobs you know about will be done by AI.”

So, children, there’s a nice introduction to AI: it’s coming to take your jobs, and here it is at the Edinburgh Fringe, taking over your comedy as well. 

Artificial Intelligence Improvisation is, on a surface level, exactly what it sounds like. An improv show featuring AI – live actors mix with an artificial intelligence system named ALE.x, which stands for Artificial Language Experiment, producing an improv show in a rather traditional format. 

Piotr Mirowski started off the show by explaining what AI is and introducing ALE.x, a small, non-threatening robot. AI seemingly still needs an accessible introduction to members of the audience who may have wandered in – after all, AI really only recaptured the imaginations of the collective conscience last year with the release of the ChatGPT chatbot. But Improbotics, the team behind the show, have been using AI in improv since 2016. 

“It was a novelty,” Mirowski reminisced about his first shows using an AI chatbot. Since then, Improbotics has grown its cast and show, and transformed as the technology improved and entered the common discourse. 

But Why AI in Improv of All Things? 

Mirowski is as seasoned in the improv world as he is in AI: he started improv in 1999, but has worked on multiple artificial intelligence projects, including for major companies like Bell Labs and Microsoft, even working on Bing’s search query automation. 

Using neural networks to predict the most logical word following a search, and yes-anding in his free time, Mirowski noticed a strange parallel between AI’s use in language prediction and the controlled-chaos of improv – and human interaction as a whole.  

“The way spontaneity works it’s about a baggage of culture,” noted Mirowski as he explained some of the theory behind improv, which inspired some of his work in AI. 

Much like jazz musicians who tend to use less of their prefrontal context when they are improvising musical riffs, Mirowski explained, improv artists try to use the least amount of executive brain function possible, allowing them to riff off their co-actors and produce comedic, absurdist, and unique dialogue. 

Improv is reactive, but needs to be relatable. It pulls on current events, our collective memory, and the accessible memory of the actors performing. It makes sense out of nonsense and then turns it on its head, conjuring magic from the mundane. 

Jumping from theme to ever-more-ridiculous theme, actors perform ‘heroics’ according to Mirowski, to entertain and amaze the audience. 

“Without thinking, or not thinking actively,” Mirowski points out. 

“So I saw a parallel: ‘next word prediction’ for computers is using statistics to decide what word comes next, and the model is just making things up, so to speak.

“Improvisers also try not to think and just use the implicit ‘statistics’ – or memory – to make things. There’s a parallel there.”

Mirowski explains that search query completion does not use grammar, syntax or problem solving to figure out what comes next, but uses ‘memories’ in the form of statistics to decide what might come next. This varies day to day (current events), depending on the user’s past history (personal memories), or location of the user (collective memories). 

AI Improving Improv or Improv Improving AI?

Improbotics started in 2016, using a much more rudimentary AI model to run the show. It started out as a one-person, one-robot act, but expanded as the technology advanced. 

Mirowski said he noted two major changes in AI technology that dramatically changed what was possible for improv. 

First in 2019, with the release of Transformers, a neural network that had a better way of looking at ‘memory,’ allowing the AI to understand context and make call backs to what was mentioned in the conversation. 

“I think the best analogy I can find for this is like a canvas,” stated Mirowski — he likes relating technology to art. “It’s a neural network that stores a canvas of previous conversations and exchanges and then it can refer directly to that canvas when it’s producing the next word. 

“And the great thing with that is that it’s very good at reincorporation, reusing elements of the past, and the longer the canvas, the longer the context, the better the systems are.”

Recommended

• Scottish Cultural Organisations are on the Hunt for Data Specialists
• Edinburgh University AI to Generate Fringe Shows
• Winning Team of Deloitte Datathon 2019 Announced

With this advent, the AI model could not only pick up on themes, but could directly participate in an active conversation. 

With Anthropic AI’s technology which then allowed for the AI to scan a context of 100,000 words, the possibilities only increased. 

The AI Improv show now relies on multiple different models, including LLaMA, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, to generate lines used throughout the show. 

But when ChatGPT, which relies on GPT-3.5, was launched, Mirowski was hesitant. 

“We actually didn’t switch right away, because I was worried that it might be a bit too good and a bit too obvious,” he said. 

This might seem counter-intuitive – surely if Mirowski wanted an AI that would provide the most obvious answer, which is a paramount rule of improv, then he would elect to use the best model. 

But after seeing the show, Mirowski’s concerns made sense. 

Aiming for Absurdity

In Artificial Intelligence Improvisation, ALE.x starts off with a human editor, participating in an improv scene with human actors, generating lines which are then selected for by a human actor and inserted into the scene with ALE.x’s robot voice. 

The audience quickly learns that puns are ALE.x’s comfort zone, and his absurdist interjections keep both the actors and audience on their toes. 

Next, Mirowski creates a ‘cyborg’ – an actor who wears an earpiece and is fed lines by the AI bot, interjecting into the scene, embodying the lines with emotions and physicality. 

ALE.x’s performance is like that of a precocious child. ‘He’ undoubtedly struggles to understand the emotional nuance of a surprise pregnancy reveal, or the fear of entering a haunted house. 

“We learned to work with absurdist sounding texts,” Mirowski said about he and his cohort. 

And ChatGPT was too plain, too boring, too accurate. 

But the change and advancement in AI chatbots also brought in a wider change around the conversation of AI in art. 

Mirowski  likened it to the “glitch aesthetic” which started in the summer of 2022, when people began to use DALL·E 2, a text-to-image model, to generate AI images. 

The technology was not perfect – remember the days of too many teeth, too many fingers, realistic photos with an uncanny valley feeling to them.

“The idea that you can make fun of the imperfection of it,” is something Mirowski says he misses with the newer AI chatbot models. 

“So it’s exactly like we’re exploiting the absurdity of dialogue.”

But then, more advancements in AI art, and Midjourney – an advanced AI-image generator renowned for its realistic capabilities – “and suddenly the whole shape of the conversation changed,” Mirowski recalled.

And he’s been active in that conversation. 

But is AI Funny?

The entire point of the show is not to answer the question of if AI is funnier than humans, or if it is funny at all. The point of the show is the same as any improv show – to make the actors look good, and this includes ALE.x. 

“The whole ethics or ethos of our show is that we’re using AI as a tool to make everyone look good on stage,” he said. 

In improv, everything an actor says, sensical or not, is valid. It’s “yes, and” not “no, but.”

So the challenge is to turn ALE.x’s sometimes nonsensical interjections flow and make sense, helping the actors appear creative and adaptive, while lifting “little ALE.x” – as Mirowski endearingly refers to him as – up as well. 

But Mirowski is insistent on pointing out AI’s limitations when it comes to art – he even opened the show saying that ALE.x is not art, and is not himself an artist. 

“The problem we’ve got with AI tools is essentially, they revert to the mean, they are mediocre by design” he said.

“The reason for that is because we train it on approximate data, and a wide variety of outputs. So, it will automatically revert to something that’s more likely to occur, and it will not favor something more unique.

“So that means that if you use AI tools for writing, it will regurgitate cliches, and stereotypes much more readily.”

Mirowski does want to showcase AI as a tool for art, but insists that what makes art “art”, is a process, not a product. 

“It’s not so much the output – it can create dazzling outputs,” he said. “But the whole point of art is seeing someone sharing something about themselves. It is about exploration.”

Mirowski hopes the show – which is running until the end of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival – helps to transform the conversation around AI in art. 

The performance is also fueling some of his current independent research into the nature of dialogue – the subtext, implied meaning, and importance of silence that AI chatbots are missing in their current functions. 

At the end of the day, Mirowski hopes his audience thinks that “the heroes are the humans, they are the funny ones because they make it fun. 

“But also, there is so much to be gained by finding creative inspiration in technological tools.”

And it appears that this inspiration is already hitting the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. 

Artificial Intelligence Improvisation is one of many shows featuring or discussing AI. 

From stand-up written by an AI chatbot to a cabaret act featuring an increasingly-sentient AI-robot, the Fringe appears to be taking AI’s rise in the mainstream seriously – though definitely not too seriously. 

During the show, Mirowski’s excitement is palpable, and electric – he’s just as excited as the audience is to see what ALE.x has in store.

Image Credit: Stuart Hollis Photography