Event overview
Whitehead Lecture: Researcher and actor Piotr Mirowski (DeepMind & Improbotics) will discuss the emergence of Robots and AI on the theater stage.
Abstract:
The term “robot” first appeared in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R., but it took 80 years of technological progress in artificial intelligence (AI) to bring robots into live performances alongside actors. The coexistence of naturalism and artifice, of script and improvisation, allowed theatre companies to explore human-AI relationships, while the impressive developments in language and image models have both opened new creative possibilities for artists and surfaced ethical concerns about the impact of generative AI upon the arts.
I will discuss AI as a creativity support tool, focusing on live performance with generative AI. I illustrate the talk with an example of my theater company, Improbotics, that has used AI for improvised comedy since 2016 and recently engaged the wider public at Edinburgh Fringe, as well as my research on the socio-technical evaluation of generative AI tools for visual artists or for co-writing screenplays, theatre plays and comedy.
Bio:
Dr Piotr Mirowski is a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. His research on artificial intelligence covers the subjects of reinforcement learning, navigation, weather and climate forecasting, as well as a socio-technical systems approach to human-machine collaboration and to computational creativity. He is the author of over 75 papers and patents in applications of AI to the real world. Piotr studied computer science in France at ENSEEIHT Toulouse and obtained his PhD in computer science in 2011 at New York University, with a thesis supervised by Prof. Yann LeCun (Outstanding Dissertation Award, 2011). A trained actor himself, Piotr founded and directs Improbotics, a theatre company where human actors and robots improvise live comedy performances and investigate the use of AI for artistic human and machine-based co-creation (https://improbotics.org).
Piotr is currently a Visiting Research and Knowledge Exchange Fellow at Goldsmiths, in the Computing Department.
This event is part of the "Whitehead Lectures in Cognition, Computation and Culture", hosted by Computing and Psychology at Goldsmiths: https://www.gold.ac.uk/cccc/whitehead/
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 9 Oct 2024 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm |
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