Stand-Up, Drama and Spambots: The Creative World Takes On A.I.

Artificial intelligence has become a subject for people in the art and theater worlds who are worried about being replaced by it.

Inside a curved glass building next to the Golden State Warriors’ arena in San Francisco, eight cans of Spam with tiny arms whirred to life, tapping out artificial-intelligence-generated word slop on miniature keyboards. They were part of the Misalignment A.I. Museum, a gallery dedicated to A.I.-inspired art.

Across town, in the basement of a Lower Haight boutique, a group of tech workers delivered stand-up comedy sets about programming languages, ChatGPT and Nvidia’s stock price for Artificially Unintelligent, a tech-themed comedy show.

And a month earlier, on a foggy summer night in San Francisco’s Glen Park neighborhood, a group of tech workers gathered at a midcentury house being used as a start-up office for a reading of “Doomers,” a new, ripped-from-the-headlines play about the weekend that Sam Altman, the chief executive of the start-up OpenAI, was briefly fired.

A.I. is providing the art and entertainment worlds with plenty to fear, from potential copyright violations on a global scale to the loss of jobs taken by a soulless machine. But A.I. is also quickly becoming fodder for the creative community.

The technology has long been a staple of science fiction, but now, two years into the boom kicked off by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the issues raised by those movies and books all feel a little more real. More artists, playwrights and comedians are finding inspiration in the A.I. technology that’s currently available: its ethical quandaries, its impact, its risks, its absurdities and even its executives.