This Piece May Not Be Fed Into Any LLM or Other AI Software for Any Reason Whatsoever
Notes from a Director
By Dr. Rachel Anderson-Rabern
My teenage son is so excited about speed, speed, more speed! He glories in AI music generators that allow users to select genre and topic. He is fully Aristotelian, his attention captured by the climb. We debate, sometimes, about the purpose of pace generally. Where are we trying to get to, I ask? What’s the urgency, what’s the rush? What’s the peak? I’ve never felt my gray hairs burn as brightly as they do during those conversations.
He tells me things like, “Technology saves us time. It increases human capacity, explores human potential.”
“Hmmm,” I say. And I look around. So many of us are so tired.
I look at the faces of my students and collaborators. I revel in working in a field that’s AI proof because it is live. It resists replication, substitution; it requires bodies and hearts and present responses.
Or so I thought.
Playwrights are magical creatures who, like the rest of us, aren’t in it for the money. Must we feed their work into the machine? Must we steal the soul of their craft?
There’s a whole apparatus inside this field, running through its arteries, that isn’t AI-proof at all. Words. Images. The marketing materials, including posters (Students at my college protested when a staff member used AI to create a poster advertising student new work). The play. New plays. New play submission processes.
I think increasingly about the craftspeople who play with words, shape their hearts into new stories for this moment, ride crests of impulse and creativity and idealism from gig to gig. I think about writers. Years ago, I surveyed women artists in New York and learned that one well known, prize-winning playwright sold her eggs—after securing prestigious awards—to keep the lights on. Playwrights are magical creatures who, like the rest of us, aren’t in it for the money. Must we feed their work into the machine? Must we steal the soul of their craft? When it comes to selling eggs, at least they get to decide.
My son tells me about his curiosity. He wants to see what we’ll eventually do/produce with all our speed. Again, I hear the assumption of an arrival point that will never come, that will always recede. I keep thinking, no wonder capitalism now embraces wellness industries that promise to teach us to anchor in the present (does your meditation app subscription auto-renew?). Most of us don’t know how to be present, though live theatre is an excellent, app-free tutor. Like my son, we often persist in running from the present toward the next and next and next, toward an imagined future point of perspective or satiation. That’s great for teenagers, it’s par for the developmental stage. What about the rest of us?
