An Almighty Algorithm’s Grand Debut
What’s the best measure of AI’s great proliferation?
Most obviously, we can sum up the enormous amounts of money generated by OpenAI and Anthropic—a task my colleagues at The Information approach with great vigor. We could also look at how the technology has become a top-of-mind issue in Washington. Or we might consider how AI has become a frequent villain of choice in Hollywood—particularly in horror films. With the technology getting so much screen time, good old Michael Myers must be close to firing his agent.
Another indication may be the fact that AI is at the center of a very fine new off-Broadway play, “Disruption,” headlined by film star John David Washington (“Tenet” and “BlacKkKlansman”): Live theater is marvelous, but it takes something powerfully momentous to push it away from its comfort zone of fairy tales and rhapsodic animals. “Disruption” follows “Data,” another off-Broadway production about an algorithm gone amok, from earlier this year and “Maybe Happy Ending,” a Tony-winning musical about a pair of robots who fall in love, from 2024.
No one gets a fully joyful conclusion in “Disruption.” The titular breakthrough comes at the hands of Washington’s tech gazillionaire character, Nick. (And yes, John David really does both sound and look a lot like his father, Denzel.) With a blockbuster IPO behind him, he has hastened onto his next venture—an AI startup—and already has Eric Schmidt on the hook for a $50 million investment. But he wants more and knows what he needs most is tangible proof of his predictive algorithm’s effectiveness in guiding people’s lives—ostensibly toward truest contentment. So Nick allows the AI to begin studying six of his oldest friends unbeknownst to them, of course. Heartbreak and tragedy ensue.
“Disruption,” which runs through the beginning of October, originated in a London production in 2023, receiving a raft of warm reviews. Playwright Andrew Stein deserves credit for a fair amount of prescience: He penned an initial draft back in 2018.
“ChatGPT came out for public use between when our production in London was announced and when rehearsal began,” he recalled. “So we hit this moment where this went from being a sci-fi thing to being a zeitgeist thing.”
In preparing “Disruption” for its London debut, Stein and director Hersh Ellis pored over books written by Ray Kurzweil and Yuval Noah Harari. “I would describe Andrew and myself as ‘AI curious,’” said Ellis. “We’re both people who believe in the power and the potential of what AI can do. And we’re also people who are not naive to what could happen if it goes unchecked.”
Exporting the play to New York, they kept the script mostly unchanged. A larger budget has allowed a significant upgrade to the production values, with seating that looks down at the stage: The fishbowl-like setup provides an intimate observation of the characters, a parallel to the omniscient AI’s own minute inspection of them.
These days Stein relies on AI as a constant resource for research—he and Ellis are at work on a new play about the building of the Panama Canal—but finds it steadily creeping into more of his everyday life. “Sometimes it will say to me something like, ‘Based on what I know about you and your patterns,’ and that’s when I know that, yeah, I’m in deep,” he said.