Whitehead Lectures in Cognition, Computation and Culture
Goldsmiths' Departments of Computing and Psychology organise regular lectures by guest speakers throughout the academic year encompassing diverse aspects of cognition, computation and culture. All are welcome to attend.
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For enquiries related to the lectures, please contact Karina Linnell or Jamie A Ward.
Autumn 2024
Actors bringing robots to life on the theatre stage
Dr Piotr Mirowski, Google DeepMind
Time: 9 October 2024, 4pm
Location: RHB137a
Zoom link available after registering
The term “robot” first appeared in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R., but it took eighty years of technological progress in artificial intelligence 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.
See the full event listing for more information.