Review: Annie Dorsen Mocks the Artistry of AI in Prometheus Firebringer

Can artificial intelligence make art? As image generators grow in sophistication and large language models (LLM) push teachers to the brink of insanity, it’s become harder to plant a flag in a definitive answer. Luckily, Annie Dorsen is immune to our culture of philosophical handwringing. Instead, she delivers an unequivocal “no” while subtly and scathingly mocking the mere suggestion of computer-as-artist with just a title.

Prometheus Firebringer is the name of Dorsen’s latest piece of “algorithmic theater” — a growing collection of dramatic experiments with chatbots and other computer-generated content (performances run through October 1 at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center). The title refers to the third (or possibly first) play in Aeschylus’s Prometheia trilogy, of which, only Prometheus Bound survives in its entirety. Fragments remain of Prometheus Unbound, and barely anything at all is left of Prometheus Firebringer. So what more qualified scholar than GPT-3.5 to fill in the ancient blanks?

Dorsen is counting on the premise sounding as absurd to you as it does to her. And like a biting joke delivered with a perfectly straight face, the piece’s droll framework pays off. But if this deep cut in Greek tragedy is already feeling a bit heady, be warned that it only gets denser from here. Prometheus Firebringer is more a stylized academic lecture than it is a piece of presentational theater. Dorsen herself calls it an “essay,” or perhaps a “think piece.” Of course, all of these words — which she reads from a pile of papers while seated stage left at a professorial desk — are not exactly hers.

Like a hand-crafted LLM, Dorsen has turned excerpts of publicly available prose into a sermon about the dangers of surrendering artistic and intellectual agency to machines. Simon Critchley, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag are just a few of the dozens of sampled academics (and a few laymen) whose words she cobbles into a coherent argument. Meanwhile stage right, AI-generated masks voiced by AI-generated audio intermittently perform an AI-generated guesstimate of the story of Prometheus Firebringer — the reconciliation of Zeus’ beef with Prometheus for stealing fire and equipping humanity with the instrument-cum-weapon of technology (a thematically fitting tale).  

The implicit question in these side-by-side presentations is…what’s the difference? For one thing, Dorsen actually credits her sources with a constant stream of citations projected behind her (video and systems design by Ryan Holsopple). But the most significant distinction Dorsen would like to make between her idea mosaic and the computer’s is that of “influence” vs. “algorithm.” The former invites agency and the ethical considerations that accompany it. The latter is a hands-free ride to who-knows-where (Sukanya Aneja masterminds the show’s software design and programming). The most horrifying eventuality of all, Dorsen argues, is humanity’s willing subservience to the algorithm. She references artist Matt Loughrey’s colorized images of Khmer Rouge victims complete with edited smiles as a particularly disturbing example.

Intellectually speaking, Dorsen’s points are compelling and well-taken. Theatrically speaking, it’s a desert on both sides of the stage. For the technologically allergic, it might be a comfort to hear that GPT-3.5 writes an incredibly dull play, delivered by computerized voices that could lull an insomniac to sleep (Ian Douglas-Moore contributes sound design). It makes you wish Dorsen’s portions felt like more of a reprieve. Instead, you feel the density of her borrowed language, which, in its own way, has been inorganically cut and pasted together and is dryly delivered like a statement being entered into court record. Maybe this is Dorsen leveling the performative playing field between herself and her electronic counterpart. But even the prose itself feels zombified — a human skeleton with a hollow soul. It drops Prometheus Firebringer squarely in your head, even as Dorsen details tragedy’s transcendent ancient design. But if the master plan of this algorithmic theater pioneer is to leave you yearning for the holistic experience of ineffable human drama, it absolutely works.