Computers are the performers in Annie Dorsen’s “Hello Hi There.”
“It’s about two computer chat bots who use a 1971 debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault as material for a new live dialogue on the topic of human nature,” said Ms. Dorsen, who is based in New York.
The piece, which has been performed in Europe, is making its United States debut as part of this year’s Coil Festival at Performance Space 122. (Alexis Soloski recently wrote about Ms. Dorsen and other sci-fi-loving theater artists with shows in New York.)
Ms. Dorsen, who directed the very non-bot rock musical “Passing Strange,” recently spoke with ArtsBeat about how language, dramaturgy and talking machines inspired her show. Following are excerpts from the conversation.
There are some pretty heavy philosophical questions being asking in this piece. What was on your mind?
I was interested in this question: Is there something universal or innate that is human nature, or are we programmed from our culture and environment? Chomsky, on the side of the innate, uses linguistic theory to say human children have an innate language capacity. This ability to communicate new thought with words is evidence that there is an innate human nature.
To test him a little bit I wanted to use chat bots. They also create new language, and therefore new thought. But they are not humans. They fail, like humans do. We lose track of words, use non-sequiturs, make all kinds of mistakes, just like the chat bots do in the piece. There are flashes of humanity in the machines.
What kind of technology are you using?
It’s a simple software problem called natural language processing, basically another name for a chat bot. It’s a simple form of artificial intelligence, and quite old fashioned. It was very popular in the 70s around the time of this debate.
In 1950 Alan Turing proposed what has become known as the Turing test. The idea was that if you can create a machine that can trick a human into believing that it’s got consciousness, then that counts as consciousness. The idea was that consciousness is in the eye of the beholder somehow. It’s created a big interest in natural language processing to see whether people could write software programs that would successfully trick a human user into believing that they are conversing with another human being.
Where does the chat bots’ language come from in this show? How do they know what to say?
They work from a large database that I filled up with philosophy, excerpts from the debate, material from Shakespeare, the Bible, comments on YouTube about the debate, things that I wrote, some general conversations that were chitchat given to me by the chat bot programmer i worked with.
They start with the same sentence: “The pursuit of this discussion I fear will inevitably lead to the question of meaning.” Then they make patterns and connections. Each input gets an output and an output becomes the new input. They are continually responding to each other. Everything they say almost always makes sense grammatically. The chat bots are making connections, new statements. They have certain algorithms in which they sometimes make weird word replacements.
I let them go for about 45 to 50 minutes, the time of the debate. I give an intro that explains the piece, the press play on the machines. The debate plays without sound on a monitor. The bots discuss. At the end of the video I stop them.
Is there a script or do the chat bots make it up?
Every night the conversation will be radically different. There isn’t a narrative. There’s a dramaturgy. It’s theater. It’s a live event. The laptops are performing live and spontaneously. The show allows one to question what is liveness, what is live performance.
There are no actors, and not much of a set. Why did you decide to make this a theater piece, with an audience, instead of an art installation?
I was actually turned down by the NEA for a grant because it has no actors. I thought, that’s a strange definition of theater. No one knows how to define theater. To decide that it’s only theater if there are actors seems strange.
“Hello Hi There” runs through Jan. 22 at Performance Space 122. More information is at the Coil Festival Web site.