Robert Downey Jr., Ayad Akhtar and Bartlett Sher on “Truthful Lies” in AI, Art and Politics

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Speaker 1 Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 1 If you've been listening to the show, you know I've been talking to a lot of people about AI recently. Why not? It's the tech du jour, I guess, as there always is one.

Speaker 1 Tech leaders like Microsoft's Mustafa Suleiman about personal AI assistance and its impact on climate change, Bill Gates about energy and regulation, and Signal's Meredith Whitaker about power consolidation and how AI is continuing to fuel the surveillance economy.

Speaker 1 I also got into the implications of AI for our society and democracy with historian Yuval Noah Harari, whose book centers a lot on AI and information systems.

Speaker 1 The thing with AI is it's not just about consumer products or manufacturing revolution or helping people solve cancer. It's having and going to have an impact on all of us.

Speaker 1 To quote the writer Jacob McNeil in the new play McNeil, digital machines are not just remaking stories, they're remaking us. McNeil is now showing at the Lincoln Center Theater in New York.

Speaker 1 I saw it last week and I was blown away by it in a really interesting ways. It made me think.
I do not agree with a lot of the critics. I think you should go see it.
And it's not just about AI.

Speaker 1 It's also about the truth. It's about the pillaging of information.
It's about plagiarism. It's about lies and, of course, power.

Speaker 1 McNeil is written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar, directed by Tony Award-winning director Bartlett Scheer. And it stars Oscar-winning actor Robert Downey Jr.
in his Broadway debut.

Speaker 1 He's really done a great job here also. And of course, we all know him from being Tony Stark, the greatest greatest tech figure in the MCU.
Quite an impressive and interesting combination of people.

Speaker 1 I'm happy to say that all three of these creative powerhouses are my guests today. And our expert question comes from the front man for OpenAI himself, Sam Altman, who is name-checked in the play.

Speaker 1 So, Tony Stark is in the house. This is going to be fun.
Listen up.

Speaker 1 All right, Ayad, Bart, and Robert, thanks for being on on. I'm super excited to talk to you three.

Speaker 5 Likewise, thank you. Confetti all around.

Speaker 6 Confetti.

Speaker 7 You're using the

Speaker 1 fantasy. Oh, wow.
That looks nice.

Speaker 1 Anyway, I really am excited to talk about McNeil. I saw it at Lincoln Center on Tuesday.
I loved it. I know you're getting sort of mixed reviews from critics, but I feel like they don't get it.

Speaker 1 And I see what their criticisms, I read all of them and everything else. But I really do feel like

Speaker 1 I've seen a lot of AI stuff.

Speaker 1 I think most of it I don't get, and this I understood what was happening, but artificial intelligence, specifically generative AI, plays a central role in the play, although I don't think it is the central story at all as a tool, as a metaphor, as a lens.

Speaker 1 So to start off, I'd like each of you to tell me what chat GPT prompt you would use to ask the AI bot for help with your part of the production.

Speaker 1 Ayad, you go first, then Bart, then Robert.

Speaker 5 Well, I mean, it would just be some redux of what I tried to do throughout the writing of the play, which is could you rewrite this play?

Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 Which it did, was that never really able to do very well. So I wasn't able to use much of that or any of it really until the end.

Speaker 5 Bart?

Speaker 8 That's a funny one because when you're directing, it's so like with real people, and it's very hard to kind of get the information. So mine might be something like,

Speaker 8 Please provide the critics all the information they need to properly evaluate the show.

Speaker 5 Oh, nice.

Speaker 7 Okay.

Speaker 1 Please get rid of critics.

Speaker 8 No, I don't, no, I wouldn't say that. I think they can be very helpful and very great.
But you, you know.

Speaker 1 All right. Robert?

Speaker 6 Well, first of all, I found the mixed reaction an absolute joy because it suspended our disbelief in the fact that it's irrelevant, particularly nowadays. It's about what is the audience's enjoyment.

Speaker 6 I haven't really played with any of these

Speaker 1 things.

Speaker 1 At all. Interesting.
Nope. Nope.
Why is that?

Speaker 6 Well, it's not that I'm not a techno-optimist. It's that one would need to access it and not become frustrated with downloading the app.

Speaker 6 And I'm sure I could have it done, but also I wanted to maintain a bit of innocence going into this and really have the character's point of view as this is taking place in the supposed near future, where it'll all be different anyway.

Speaker 1 So what I want to dig more into AI in a minute, but but much of your work today, your novel, memoir, Homeland Elegies, which was amazing, a number of your plays, including your Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Disgraced, have focused on the American Muslim experience.

Speaker 1 So, this is a departure. For people who haven't seen it, can you give us a quick synopsis of McNeil so people understand what's happening here

Speaker 1 and talk about the impetus for writing it? It wasn't like, I should do an AI play because AI is the thing, like, right?

Speaker 5 Well,

Speaker 5 so Robert plays a novelist, Jacob McNeil, of some renown,

Speaker 7 who

Speaker 5 in the first scene wins the Nobel and goes on a truth-telling bender,

Speaker 5 partly to torch his career in life and partly to sort of scintillate and burn at even greater intensity than he ever has.

Speaker 5 And the play unfolds over a course of seven scenes in which you gradually start to perhaps understand that McNeil is himself a composite of Bellow and Roth and Mailer and Stevens and other writers that are referenced in the play.

Speaker 5 And perhaps at some point the play is actually being generated by an artificial intelligence that has sort of been set in motion in the first scene. So

Speaker 5 that's the basic summation of the play. But I think there's a, you know, Bart can speak to this and so can Robert eloquently.
There's an a human through line, which

Speaker 5 hopefully is the essential experience that the audience is having.

Speaker 1 Right, because he is an amalgamation of so many people, you'd see. And it's sort of a person who's run out of fucks and is tired of

Speaker 1 the change of society. I think the encounter between him and the reporter was particularly pungent in that way.

Speaker 1 But, Robert, this is your Broadway debut, and you were kind of an obvious choice for this role, maybe or maybe not. Even if you've never used AI, you have one in Iron Man named Jarvis.

Speaker 1 So, you're comfortable with the paradigm for sure. You'd have to be in some way.
But, talk about why you wanted to do this play in particular and why do a play at all?

Speaker 1 Because it's not an you could have done a lot of easy plays, I suspect, right?

Speaker 9 Yes, it's not an easy show.

Speaker 1 show.

Speaker 6 Well, I mean, I think you can agree that oftentimes in retrospect, you go, well, why did I make that decision?

Speaker 10 Right.

Speaker 6 And it's kind of difficult really to explain.

Speaker 6 Aad's writing transported me, regardless of the themes therein.

Speaker 6 And knowing that Bart had signed on to direct it and then it was going to be at Lincoln Center. And then maybe one day we'd be talking to you after my review.

Speaker 1 That's your whole goal.

Speaker 6 Well, it's really interesting because you've been out there a lot lately.

Speaker 6 And I would never be interested in a generated version of your opinions, thoughts, or

Speaker 6 your contributions. I'm only interested in the human experience of what I hear you say and see you do.

Speaker 6 And there's something about the death of the author or the fear of it. and the addition of

Speaker 6 these now impeding technologies and our fear about being overwhelmed by them, and then also our guilt for maybe acknowledging that we're always using shortcuts and hacks in life.

Speaker 6 It's our dirty little secret.

Speaker 1 Which the character points out, Shakespeare was a plagiarist. I mean, I think we used to call it plagiarism, and in AI we call it, you know, amalgamation or

Speaker 1 synopsizing, but it's plagiarism nonetheless. But

Speaker 1 when you directed the play, and you're also executive producer at Lincoln Center Theater, where it's running, what enticed you again was it the moment

Speaker 1 we are in an AI moment and Open AI is valued $157 billion.

Speaker 1 Anthropic is about to be valued at $40 billion, a startup, right? I know Robert, I'll get to it, makes tech investments in AI also. But what does it mean to you at this moment?

Speaker 1 Because I don't think it's about AI. It's about the human condition.
It's just the latest technology. That's why I sort of...
was beefing with some of the critics on that.

Speaker 8 Well, I think there's a unique relationship that the theater has to live experience, you know, especially if you come to the Beaumont, where it's like in a circle, like you were sitting at the Acropolis on the hillside.

Speaker 8 And the idea that human beings can come and be in the same room and have a conversation with one of our leading actors and one of our greatest writers about a subject which we all are facing becomes the unique activity mechanism of how theater sort of operates to create a conflict, consensus, experience shared, and that's uniquely human.

Speaker 8 So you have this great kind of collision between the subject of AI, which is so beyond us, and the deeply human experience of sharing it within a theater with spoken words and being so close to actual human beings.

Speaker 8 And that to me seemed like a really fun thing. Also, it gave me a chance to play with lots of technologies which are new to the theater and intersect them with that same experience.

Speaker 1 What did you use? What did you use, these technologies? Besides a set, and I'll get to that in a a minute, because a set is a character in and of itself.

Speaker 8 Yeah, it's mostly in the set.

Speaker 8 The way in which the set uses LED and projection, and the way we can build these transitions, which we would never have had the capacity to do five years ago, and the amount of space and just for computer power we need to build these transitions and put them on an LED upstage and all that is super fun.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it looks like the inside of an iPhone. I mean, the whole thing looks like, or a really demented Apple Store or something like that, you know, like that you're in a moment,

Speaker 1 which I think is a very critical part of it. But in a lot of ways, it's a classic tragedy.
A man at the top of his game is revealed as the person he is. He goes into a downward spiral.

Speaker 1 Aya, talk about Jacob McNeil. We see him through phases with AI.

Speaker 1 In the beginning, he mocks that he calls the AI chap out a soulless silicon suckup and that computer-generated stories are flooding the zone like odorless sewage.

Speaker 1 In the speech, after winning the Nobel Prize, he says, no matter what the data purports to tell us, Palo Alto is no Delphi. Sam Altman is no Oracle.
He is not. I know him quite well.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 he's not stupid, though, compared to many of them.

Speaker 1 But by the end, he uses AI to write a new book and says, quote, watching those pages come out of the printer was like seeing the last chunk of the Antarctic ice fall into the ocean.

Speaker 1 There's no turning back.

Speaker 1 Talk about this, how McNeil's trajectory with the use of AI and its implications.

Speaker 5 Well,

Speaker 5 I think it mirrors my own. I mean, I started.

Speaker 1 You use generative AI in the writing of this play.

Speaker 5 Well, not only in the writing of this play, but just generally. I have been very interested in it since GPT went live in November of 22.
And I have been sort of actively engaged in it.

Speaker 5 I've seen some of the tools in Hollywood, the more advanced tools that people are using for story, and they're astonishing.

Speaker 5 I mean, what's happening is truly, truly astonishing and hard to believe, actually, when you actually watch it.

Speaker 5 And so, you know, one of the things that I wanted the play to do was to create that sense of magic.

Speaker 5 And you have that in the final monologue, where the monologue appears generated by AI, that there's a sense of magic that this is actually happening because I feel that

Speaker 5 that's been my experience. Now, of course,

Speaker 5 I had to imitate the AI in order to make it work for the play. I couldn't get the AI to do it itself.

Speaker 1 Yet.

Speaker 5 But yeah, not yet. But I think...

Speaker 1 Just for people who know, in one of the traditions, audience these texts being uploaded into a chatbot, King Lear, Madame Bover, you had a Gabbler, Oedipus Rex, Kafka, the prodigal son, some medical material, and they and say it in the voice.

Speaker 1 Reagan and Goldwater. Yeah, Reagan and Goldwater.
Say it in the voice of this playwright.

Speaker 1 It's about synthesis, but this does it on a fast level in the way the human brain can't do.

Speaker 1 And it comes up with dumb ideas. And what I always tell people is, well, there's nine dumb ideas, I said, but there's three good ones.
Like that you would have never thought of.

Speaker 5 I would say that the most astonishing experience I've had with the tools that I've seen is the AI's story capacity to give notes to itself.

Speaker 5 Its ability to analyze a story and identify the weaknesses and potential opportunities is the thing that has been most surprising.

Speaker 1 Did you put the whole play through it and say, what could I do better here?

Speaker 5 No, I didn't, but a friend of mine did. And he put it in and he actually generated a podcast.
It was the second day that notebook.lm had gone live.

Speaker 1 Right. This is this Google thing that creates podcasts that are not bad.

Speaker 5 He sent me an 11-minute podcast on the play that was certainly better than anything any critic had written. I mean, it was very interesting.

Speaker 1 So, when you think of your character,

Speaker 1 Robert,

Speaker 1 how were you approaching it? Because you are playing sort of a trope of an old white man writer who was at the top of the game, Saul Bellow. It's mentioned in the play several different times.

Speaker 1 Were you trying to play him like a dinosaur or someone really leaning into the future?

Speaker 1 Because you leaned right into the AI with a lot of verve that a lot of these guys, I don't think, would have necessarily.

Speaker 6 Sure. Well, to backtrack for a second with my relative past and the MCU, I only ever really looked at AI and Jarvis, who then turns into vision and now has his own series

Speaker 6 as a storytelling device about

Speaker 6 a futurist who's relying on his own creations to

Speaker 6 address his own mortality in some ways.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 6 the other thing about the play that I find so

Speaker 6 critical is that he's essentially given a death sentence in scene one as well.

Speaker 7 Right.

Speaker 6 At the same time as he's being awarded the Nobel. So that to me is a story device, which is so critical to everything that happens after it.

Speaker 6 In other words, if you knew your days were super numbered, like 95 minutes on stage, what would you do?

Speaker 6 What kind of duets would you want to involve yourself in? But my approach to it was honestly, and Aad said, no cell phones during rehearsal. Let's not be distracted.

Speaker 6 Let's try to bring as much of our human human energy to this apocryphal tale about a truism that is descending upon us in the now.

Speaker 6 So what a great opportunity as a performer to go, okay, I found myself just trying to become an amalgam of Bart's thoughts and Aad's words and the cast's feedback and then my own kind of strange interconnectedness with technology and storytelling for the last 20 years.

Speaker 1 No, no, your character, Iron Man, Tony Stark, is almost friends with the AI.

Speaker 1 I mean, one of the things that I always thought is, what a lonely man you are, because that's the only person you really interact with on a looser basis, right?

Speaker 1 Until you make friends with Captain America, I guess.

Speaker 1 But that is your friend.

Speaker 6 I love hearing you talk about the MTU.

Speaker 7 I love the MTU.

Speaker 1 I have questions. Dr.
Doom, we'll get to it in a minute.

Speaker 5 Can I dovetail? I mean, can I jump on something that Downey just said?

Speaker 5 Something about the death sentence in the first scene. I mean, you know,

Speaker 5 we don't know each other, but I come by my pretension, honestly. I don't mean to be pretentious by design, but

Speaker 5 the Taoists have this wonderful saying, which is that in the moment that you openheartedly accept the reality of your death, in the very next moment, the Tao is born.

Speaker 5 And so in a weird way, what Downey's character, what McNeil is on a journey for is actually to see what's on the other side of the fear of death.

Speaker 5 And of course, fear of death and death itself is a thing that AI doesn't understand. So that's a fundamental paradox at the the core of the play.

Speaker 1 I suspect this character never gave a fuck. Doesn't seem like it the way he treats people, right?

Speaker 7 He doesn't seem to.

Speaker 6 Well, it's interesting that he proclaims that he no longer wants to live in fear of anything, particularly not the end. And by the end, he reminds the audience that he has changed very little.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 It's our inability to change but a very little,

Speaker 6 and this kind of capitulation to these, you know, these historic

Speaker 6 being overrun by what's coming.

Speaker 1 What's coming. So, Bart,

Speaker 1 you all seem, I would say, like tech optimists. I think this play is tech optimistic.

Speaker 1 I know it sounds crazy, but it really is, because the villain is the people, are the people, essentially, in some fashion.

Speaker 1 AI

Speaker 1 doesn't abuse a child. AI doesn't drink excessively and make trouble, everything else.
It's actually quite controlled.

Speaker 1 What do you say to people who have real concerns about AI, worries about copyright violations, fear of AI will replace creative jobs, writers, artists, artists, even theater, although theater is a very live experience, obviously, but certainly playwright, it can be written by AI.

Speaker 1 These plays will be written by AI and get better and better.

Speaker 8 Aaron Powell, I mean, the part that I most identify with AI is in the play itself, where they talk about Shakespeare's plagiarism, because one of the first rules, going back to Aristotle, for creativity, is imitation.

Speaker 8 In other words, you take something, you imitate it, and then you develop your own style from it.

Speaker 8 And so what I find comforting about it is that we all participate in this.

Speaker 8 And instead of looking at the AI as something that's going to take us all over, I think of it more like a Shakespearean metaphor of a mirror held up to nature. It helps us see more.
It reflects back.

Speaker 8 We use it to see more what we can't and then advance from there.

Speaker 8 Whether I think it can quite capture the unique intuition and highly developed, enormously incredible ideas of a great artist is completely ahead of us.

Speaker 7 I don't think about it that way.

Speaker 1 Random, which is why I can't know about death. It can't do random very well, and people do random rather well, right? And that's the whole difference.

Speaker 8 Yeah, random is the center of making good art.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think that's one of the plots of Star Trek at one point, the Kobayashi, whatever, conundrum, whatever they call it there.

Speaker 5 I'm not sure the play is a techno-opto. I mean, I hear what you're saying, and I don't entirely.

Speaker 1 No, I think it made it look cool.

Speaker 7 I think

Speaker 5 it might make it look cool, but I think it does pose the question of whether flawed humanity really is not ultimately preferable to a kind of sanitized and more

Speaker 5 sort of less human future. I mean, I think I don't think it comes down on one side versus the other, but I think it does, it does present that, tries to present that paradox.

Speaker 5 And I think that great literature, as Jacob McNeill says in the first scene, is not about liking the people in it.

Speaker 1 We'll be back in a minute.

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Speaker 1 So every week we get a question from an outside expert. Here's one from a guy who knows a thing or two about AI, OpenIA founder Sam Altman, the guy who isn't an Oracle.
He has a question for you.

Speaker 13 Hi, this is Sam Altman, and my big question is this.

Speaker 13 In a world where artificial intelligence keeps getting better at the rate that we hope it might and can write beautiful things, but learns from what humans and society have developed and also gives a new tool for people to build better and better things, like photography did for art and many other things have done for before.

Speaker 13 What is the sort of social contract of artificial intelligence with production of art?

Speaker 1 Okay, there's the main guy who's the big big moment, Sam Altman, who you mentioned in the play. He is not an oracle.
I don't think he thinks himself on.

Speaker 1 But what is the social contract of artificial intelligence? Because there isn't one and it's being run by individual people that

Speaker 1 aren't you guys anymore.

Speaker 6 Sure.

Speaker 5 I mean, we're talking about a larger issue that has to do with sort of a larger genealogy of us not having a common, an idea of a common good that is overseen by our government, say.

Speaker 5 And you have, we have technologies where, you know, in the 21st century, to exist in the public space is to exist with under the aegis of five companies.

Speaker 5 And those companies are monetizing our cognition.

Speaker 5 So, I mean, if we're going to have that conversation, I mean, I think it's very nice for Sam to ask the question the way he does, but it is facile to even pose the question that way.

Speaker 1 Okay, tell me why.

Speaker 5 Well, because the social contract is up to him. It's up to him and a few other people.

Speaker 5 And if they want to sit around and figure out what an appropriate social contract is for the rest of us, that's fine.

Speaker 5 But in reality, over the last 15 years, we're existing within a regime where in order to communicate publicly, in order to live our lives, in order to have goods and services delivered, we're living within a regime that they've created.

Speaker 5 And there really isn't an alternative. So for folks to say, well, we can just power down our phones.

Speaker 1 What should we all agree on when they run everything? Yeah, I think it's a great thing.

Speaker 5 So I think I just, I kind of reject the question out of hand.

Speaker 1 Oddly enough, when he sent it to me, I said, well, what is this fucking social contract?

Speaker 5 Well, so

Speaker 5 we're on the same page, even though you're looking at me quizzically as I'm speaking.

Speaker 6 I'll give you a counterpoint after Bart.

Speaker 7 Okay, Bart, you go.

Speaker 8 No, I think, you know, I think when

Speaker 8 you see Mark Zuckerberg testifying to Congress about, you know, how Facebook could be regulated over content, you know, that Mark Zuckerberg has to be participate in that with suggestions and ideas about what that is.

Speaker 8 So that a social contract means an agreement between two sides. So whatever Sam has to offer offer and whatever we can offer can come up with a solution.
But

Speaker 8 it can't be put on us to decide the solution for the whole thing. Doesn't make sense.
Okay, Robert?

Speaker 6 I don't envy anyone who has been over-identified with the advent of this new

Speaker 6 phase of the information age. The idea that somehow or other it belongs to them because they have these super huge startups, I think is a fallacy.

Speaker 7 I also

Speaker 6 would say in

Speaker 6 defense that, you know, the steering committee

Speaker 7 is

Speaker 6 all of us and the collective unconscious and what we decide to do. You know, we all know where we're at right now.

Speaker 6 The reason I wanted to be doing this play during this election is I feel that we are at critical juncture after critical juncture.

Speaker 6 And in a way, any good piece of theater is a metaphor for the times we find ourselves living and breathing in.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 6 I just think that the problem is when these individuals believe that they are the arbiters of managing this, meanwhile,

Speaker 6 wanting and or needing to be seen in a favorable light, that is a massive fucking error. And it turns me off and makes me not want to engage with them because they are not being truthful.

Speaker 6 This play is about someone who is no longer interested in being seen in anything like a favorable light and is therefore able to enter the realm of truth, whatever that means for him.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you're absolutely right. They love being, they cannot stand being seen as villains or even slight villains, even slight criticism, you know.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and I'm, and I'm not, and I'm not saying that Sam's a villain or that any of them are villains, but to pose the question like that is so facile that it just, it boggles my mind.

Speaker 1 Because they, because they think we're all in it together.

Speaker 5 Give me a break. Give me a break.
They're monetizing our cognition.

Speaker 13 So I mean, it's like.

Speaker 5 What would we do if we were them?

Speaker 7 Say, God, I don't know. No, no, no.

Speaker 6 I don't know if you should put me out of business or not.

Speaker 5 This is about position within the social hierarchy. It's not my place.

Speaker 5 My place is to play the role that I play, Robert.

Speaker 5 It's not to put myself in the place of Sam Altwin. And you know what I mean? It's like, I have a role.

Speaker 6 I don't feel like you're flying off the handle enough.

Speaker 7 I love seeing you at your fiery best.

Speaker 6 I feel you're way too controlled right now.

Speaker 1 Well, interestingly, when I, one time, I was interviewing Mark Zuckerberg and he said, you know, all of us together as a community should decide on these standards.

Speaker 1 And I said, well, why do you control everything then?

Speaker 1 Why do you have controlling shares in Facebook and therefore all decisions are made by you?

Speaker 1 And therefore, why don't you give me control of it with you and then we'll do actual control? He's like, well, you want me to give you my stock? And I said, sure. He has all the power and you don't.

Speaker 1 So you can't have a real discussion about anything with Sunday.

Speaker 6 I don't think he has any more power than I allow him to have. And that might be a bit naive, but I also know that things tend to organize at a higher level post-chaos.
We are in chaos right now.

Speaker 6 And a lot of this has to do with what is our sub-intentional

Speaker 6 attribute.

Speaker 6 What do we mean to create? And even just looking at how hamstrung I think everyone feels at how down to the wire the future of Western democracy is coming. And yet we go, wait, what can I do?

Speaker 6 Stop wringing your hands or roll up your sleeves. I go,

Speaker 6 I feel like I should be out, you know, stumping for Dukakis, knowing he's going to lose.

Speaker 6 We are in a new era where I believe that

Speaker 6 we ultimately will wrest control of these things because the few may have had too much power for too long. I don't know how it's going to happen, but I feel that McNeil particularly,

Speaker 6 people are leaving the theater feeling a little bit less terrified and a little more hopeful because they're feeling that this was ultimately a human story about a modern issue.

Speaker 1 Let me finish talking a little bit more about the play because that's about power.

Speaker 1 What you're talking about is power. So Bart, you said AI is integrated, obviously, in the set design, and we talked about text prompts.

Speaker 1 There's also AI-generated deep vex of Robert on screen, which is intermixed with the other, I think, Melora Harden, who plays New York Times editor of some sort.

Speaker 1 Would you say AI becomes a character itself? Because you use those there on the screen quite a bit, and it's disturbing, and it has that AI-disturbing porniness to it. I don't know.

Speaker 1 All my AI stuff, when I wrote my book, they made AI fakes of my book. It got a lot of attention, and every photo of me on the cover looked porny.
Like, I don't know what else to say.

Speaker 1 And I'm not easily made into a porn character. But is it a character itself? And how do do you direct that AI character? What's your relation to him? Why did you put that there?

Speaker 1 Besides freaking people out?

Speaker 8 Yeah, that's a really interesting question.

Speaker 8 I think they're all extensions of the mind of AIDA Ktar. So in the sense that I'm interacting with the larger sort of questions he's asking, then they're tools.

Speaker 8 The tools are different kinds of ways of which to deliver that information.

Speaker 8 But I think ultimately there was no actual character that was AI that I would specifically direct, but there were tools that the AI offered to keep enhancing and developing and pushing the story forward.

Speaker 1 Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: And the point of those pictures is to show the amalgamation. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Well, it was by design in the script in the sense that one of the things that I wanted the play to do is I wanted it to exist within this nether space between the virtual part of our relating to human faces and the actual live experience of relating to a human face on a stage.

Speaker 5 And the fact that we had Robert, a face that everybody knows.

Speaker 1 Right. Actually, it helped.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it made that so much richer. And how to create, as you said, we're inside an iPhone.
How do you create a live experience of the virtual experience we're having of each other?

Speaker 5 And so the AI is operating, the deep fakes are all operating in a way to kind of destabilize that reality.

Speaker 5 But also, AI is operating as a kind of metaphor for the unconscious because AI hallucinates, but we also hallucinate.

Speaker 1 That's correct. Which he does throughout the play, because it's not clear when he's in AI and what he's hallucinating.

Speaker 5 But it's not clear if it's a computer hallucinating or if it's actually a psychic hallucination.

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, you talk about hallucinations with the drugs he's using, too. But let me ask you this question.

Speaker 1 Some of the images took a trip into Uncanny Valley, and unease when you know something isn't real or not, especially his hair.

Speaker 1 I kept fixating on Robert's hair in those pictures, which was spectacular and yet disturbing at the same time. It seems like it was intentional.

Speaker 1 The word uncanny appears a half a dozen times in the script. I think I counted all of them.

Speaker 1 That's an unusual word also, by the way, to use. Talk about what you're doing here

Speaker 1 and why you want to create, and Robert tries to create a hallucinogenic kind of situation going.

Speaker 5 I mean, the... the experience of art is a kind of ordered hallucination.
It's an ordered collective hallucination.

Speaker 5 It's one that, you know, we draw the audience into a kind of collective dream and we move them deeper, hopefully, into something that is of value or of emotional richness or what have you.

Speaker 5 So again, the metaphor of alternative reality or something uncanny, I mean, to quote the sort of Freudian Unheimlich, you know, the familiar, which is made unfamiliar in some way,

Speaker 5 that's the province, I think, of all art, at least what I'm trying to do.

Speaker 1 So, Robert, these images are deep fakes of you and others. They use Generative to create these digital replicas,

Speaker 1 which is obviously, as I said, one of the issues in the 2023 Hollywood actor's strike and writers, too.

Speaker 1 You and your fellow Oppenheimer actors, and by the way, congratulations on the well-deserved Oscar, very publicly walked out on the premiere to join the strike.

Speaker 1 Are you concerned about it yourself? You kind of said you aren't in the creative process because Tony Stark died in Avengers Endgame.

Speaker 1 They could resurrect him without you existing now, given how much body work you have. And do you have a writer to protect your likeness, something you want in your contracts going forward?

Speaker 1 And for those who don't know, Robert's coming back as, because I am an MCU person, as Dr. Doom.
My kids are very upset by this, FYI.

Speaker 1 And which means

Speaker 1 it's kind of interesting. You're kind of on Elon's journey right now from a hero to a villain.
But talk about this idea of you being recreated and how you feel about it, infiltrating the process.

Speaker 6 All right. Well, first of all, I am not on Elon's journey.
Second of all.

Speaker 1 Dr. Doom is not nice, but go ahead.

Speaker 6 Well, but there's more to the story than than just the next chapter that I'm aware of. And I could sidebar with you about.
I will say this: there's two tracks.

Speaker 6 One is, how do I feel about everything that's going on?

Speaker 6 And my answer is, I mean, I feel about it minimally because I have an actual emotional life that's occurring that doesn't have a lot of room for that.

Speaker 6 And to go back to the MCU, I'm not worried about them hijacking my character's soul because there's like three or four guys and gals who make all the decisions there anyway, and they would never do that to me, with or without me.

Speaker 1 But future executives certainly will.

Speaker 6 Well, you're right. And I would like to here state that I intend to sue all future executives just on the stage.

Speaker 7 You'll be dead, Robert.

Speaker 6 I know, but my law firm will still be very active.

Speaker 1 Okay, Elvis, thank you for that. Go ahead.

Speaker 5 I mean, SAG has been aggressive in a wonderful way about sort of trying to carve out these.

Speaker 5 That That is something the Authors Guild is also trying to do and other creative industries. And so, I mean, I think a lot of these issues, as I think Altman was alluding to in his

Speaker 5 facile question, is that some of these things are going to get worked out. And we don't know what the answers are going to be, whether it is fair use or whether it isn't.

Speaker 1 Right. Some of them are being sued.
Some of them are doing deals. It depends.
And I think a lawsuit is a negotiation anyway.

Speaker 1 But speaking of Hollywood, three of the top billings in this play are well-known Hollywood actors. There are a number of Hollywood celebrities performing on Broadway at the moment.

Speaker 1 That's not a new, fresh thing, but is this a way to be more authentic? Because as you said, live theater is not AI, even though you're bringing AI into this theater.

Speaker 1 You cannot replicate it.

Speaker 7 Huh.

Speaker 8 I have to turn it over to Robert.

Speaker 8 The experience for an actor of working on film and being shot in sort of fragments and then having it put in some sort of a suitcase and taken off somewhere to be made is very different than the experience daily of walking into a theater, working with others and repeating it night after night and exploring it over and over again.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 8 if Hollywood actors are finding their way to the theater, it's partly because to develop and hold onto the core of their work and broaden and practice and become muscular and strong.

Speaker 8 One of the things you can do is step on a stage and repeat night after night this experience and explore and use your tools consistently.

Speaker 8 And that I think is something that for somebody who loves acting, you don't get to experience in the same way if you only make film and television. So

Speaker 8 I think of it as from an artist's point of view that any great actor who loves this work has got to find themselves on a stage in some way or another to be able to experience what it's like to practice at that level.

Speaker 1 Right. And you talked about that, Robert,

Speaker 1 when I came backstage, this idea of it being different than a take, take, take kind of thing.

Speaker 6 And when Jessica Chastain snuck in, didn't tell me and let me know she'd seen the play, that was very meaningful.

Speaker 6 When Jeremy Strong and Bradley Cooper were kind of my twin Yodas going into and being in the experience now, knowing that Ed Norton is coming tonight and

Speaker 6 to cross

Speaker 6 mediums, seeing what he did in Birdman playing the ultimate serious theater actor, I'm like, this is one of those kind of rarefied air

Speaker 6 dialogues that I get to be in, not just with the audience and

Speaker 6 you and everyone, but also my peers. So there's a different kind of cred, obviously, that comes when you're on stage because we know that it's a different kind of sacrifice.

Speaker 6 But, you know, look, it also, it ain't that deep. People do it because they want to do it.
They want the challenge and they hope it goes well.

Speaker 6 And it's been absolutely revolutionizing for Susan Downey, our producer, my wife, and me, and all of us. I think we've created this kind of

Speaker 6 this pressure-tested bond together all the better because of the

Speaker 6 disparaging reaction by many of our critics.

Speaker 1 We'll be back in a minute.

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Speaker 7 I think really it's a play about power.

Speaker 1 Again, as I said, McNeil kind of personifies the end of this straight white male era. He gets called to Tasrus Lewison's misogyny, bad parenting, womanizing.

Speaker 1 At one point, he even admits to a young black female New York Times reporter that he envies former Hollywood producer, convicted serial sex offender Harvey Weinstein, which is really something many people wouldn't do.

Speaker 1 And he's doing it to provoke and create controversy with her. He did it several times, insulting her as a DEI hire, I think, and different things like that, which she kind of likes.

Speaker 1 She kind of likes that he's up to these hijinks. But talk about the shifting power dynamics in society, because you really do address them in this play quite a bit.

Speaker 1 Is it really a shift considering Donald Trump is pulling neck and neck with Vice President Harris?

Speaker 5 I don't think that the social moment we're in is resolved. I don't, you know, I think that there is a very real divide about how we are approaching all of these issues and of these power issues.

Speaker 5 And I think that part of what's getting

Speaker 5 sort of unfortunately, you know, demonically worked out in our political landscape is the kind of shadow of all of that. So the play has to engage that.

Speaker 5 I mean, I never do, I never write anything to sort of correct the world. It's not like I want to present a vision of the world that is a better vision than the world that we live in.

Speaker 5 As Bart said earlier, holding the mirror up to nature, holding the mirror up to what we are now.

Speaker 5 So, you know, the death of a white male author at a time when many would hope that such authorship should die,

Speaker 5 dovetailing with this death of a human author in a larger sense because of the advent of AI. And that's the larger piece of it that's getting sort of pushed into.

Speaker 5 And there's also a political commentary. I mean, you know, his famous book is about Barry Goldwater, a very famous American loser who has shaped American history, you know, deeply,

Speaker 5 also from the Southwest, like Jacob McNeill.

Speaker 5 So there's, you know, there's a lot going on there that

Speaker 5 I'm trying to allude to and trying to make commentary about. But of course, it's up to the audience to

Speaker 5 draw further conclusions from that.

Speaker 1 I always think a lot of people fashion themselves as bold truth tellers. I'm just a good old truth tellers when they're just an asshole.

Speaker 1 I'm like, let me know.

Speaker 5 Right, but

Speaker 5 I think an artist like Dostoevsky, for example, who is somebody who is a contrarian within his own society and is fashioning extraordinary dramatic experiences with profound human truth, is also operating in opposition to the prevailing sort of values.

Speaker 5 So I think that's a vision of the artist which is real. It's not, I mean, we can say, yeah, well, you know, they're just jerks and all of that, but they're not really.
I mean, that's, yeah.

Speaker 1 That begs the Elon Musk question. And I'm just curious, Robert, how do you feel about him thinking he's

Speaker 1 cosplaying Tony Stark almost all the time?

Speaker 1 Cullback on the ketamine a little bit.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 6 I've only met him a few times.

Speaker 6 I think that,

Speaker 6 you know, as a

Speaker 6 almost 60-year-old recovering white American male,

Speaker 6 I just wish that he would control his behavior a little more, but that's not on me.

Speaker 6 I know that this idea of

Speaker 6 it's all okay because we've got to get to Mars doesn't really hold water with me. But again, you know, you have to look at all that he's done that demonstrates why he's valuable.

Speaker 6 And again, nowadays, separating the individual from their behavior is a tough thing to do because hell is other people, and that has been hijacked in this information age to divide us rather than allow for discourse, debate, and dialogue.

Speaker 1 Bart, when you talk about this, because one of the things, even though Jacob McNeil is a tragic character, power is still being predominantly held by a few people,

Speaker 1 especially in AI. If you meet them, you'll see it's

Speaker 1 the same people. I always say

Speaker 1 that they think it's a meritocracy and it's a meritocracy, right? They just

Speaker 1 say, how funny, you're all the same. And I don't think that's necessarily a good thing because I think diversity does breed really interesting outcomes,

Speaker 1 not just racial, not just gender, but age, conservatism, location. Diversity of point of view, point of view, and stuff like that.
Do you, when you think about,

Speaker 1 is AI then a net positive? Because it doesn't have that, right? It just reflects, it vomits up what we give it. They can't exist without us.

Speaker 1 We're its fuel, almost like

Speaker 1 soil and green is people, essentially.

Speaker 1 You got the reference. Thank you.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 8 I think if it is holding a mirror up to nature and if we are truly like we are in the American theater trying to explore questions of diversity, who's doing the work, who's hearing the work, what the questions of the work are, then

Speaker 8 that mirror will see that, you know, and will reflect that in some way.

Speaker 8 That's a separate question from the more complex dynamics of who really has the power over the technology and is really wielding it and is really monetizing it and using it against us or using it to manipulate us.

Speaker 8 That particular question, which goes again back to social contract, is up to those people to be able to be willing to give away their power or share their power to ask a larger question about how we all can be better through it.

Speaker 5 Or CARA, or CARA, for us to concoct or fashion an idea of a collective good as an American people,

Speaker 5 which we can somehow induce our government to, you know, see really, because regulation is the thousand-pound gorilla that's the only corrective to any of this.

Speaker 1 Sure, of which there isn't any.

Speaker 5 Well, but that but that's the larger point.

Speaker 5 That's what I mean is that it's very, you know, not to pick on Sam Altman, who obviously is doing extraordinary things, but that's why that question is facile, because it's not up to me.

Speaker 1 I didn't like his question. I'm sending him to your play.

Speaker 5 No, no, no, no. It's not that I didn't like his question, Kara.
It's just that I think it points up. It points up a rhetoric that feels misleading.

Speaker 1 We're all on the same level.

Speaker 7 No, we're not. We're not at the same level.
So let's not pretend that we are.

Speaker 8 Also, it's also about shared narrative, too, because

Speaker 8 the one thing that happens in the theater is everybody comes in the same room and they share the same narrative.

Speaker 8 One of the biggest problems with AI is it can muddy the narrative and everybody's got a different story and that's leading to the sort of murky nature of a of a foul democracy because we're not able to have these conversations.

Speaker 5 But just to sort of like recalibrate the lens here for a second,

Speaker 7 all of that's true.

Speaker 5 And yet now we're still living, you know, as I often say about capitalism, it's easy to criticize capitalism and it's even easier to enjoy its benefits. And that's the paradox that we live in.

Speaker 5 And so we're talking about some very 35,000-foot view stuff right now.

Speaker 5 On the ground, AI is changing all of our lives and is going to continue to do so. And so what does that mean? What does it mean for us as writers? What does it mean for us as artists? What is it?

Speaker 5 So that's kind of a separate issue on some level from the larger issues that you're discussing.

Speaker 5 And so in a way, I think that the play is, you know, an attempt to live inside that space, inside that in-between space.

Speaker 1 Where you're doing. It's interesting because I think it's one of the things I always advise people when they ask about AI.
It's sort of like asking me, what's the internet?

Speaker 1 And I was like, it's everything. And now they ask me, what's AI? I said, it's everything.
Like, just try it. See it.
Try it. You'll like it.
You think you said

Speaker 5 in an exchange I was having with you that we're on the verge of a Cambrian explosion.

Speaker 7 It is a Cambrian explosion.

Speaker 5 I think it's an extraordinary metaphor because I think it's exactly right.

Speaker 7 That's right.

Speaker 5 But I think within the creative industries, so many of us have our heads buried in the sand right now.

Speaker 1 I have just a couple of questions.

Speaker 1 One for each of you left, or two, maybe for Robert. You've probably invested in AI-focused companies for a while.

Speaker 1 Tell me why that is and

Speaker 1 are negative concerns something you're worried about?

Speaker 6 Well, it always comes down again to not the technology or the opportunity to line my pockets as much as who are the people involved with this? Do I think they have a moral psychology?

Speaker 6 For what reason are they deploying this? Is their steering committee sound?

Speaker 6 Do I have something to learn from this experience? Can I be additive? So I'm a little more agnostic about these things. It always comes down to teams.
And by the way, like-minded is not the goal.

Speaker 6 I think that the idea of being able to ingest vastly divergent points of view are what help us stretch and grow. So I would never sign up.
to

Speaker 6 put my name or my time and energy, let alone money, into something that I thought wasn't going to bring more order or more possibility. But that's just me.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Then I would not advise against the Optimus robot, which was human.

Speaker 1 You could do better. They do better robots over at Disney, just so you know.
I have one more question for each of you.

Speaker 1 You wrote about post-Trump American homeland elegies and the narrator's struggles dealing with a very much pro-Trump father. I have a very much pro-Trump mother and several relatives.

Speaker 1 We are either in a post-Trump or a pre-Trump part two America, depending on the election outcome. Did your work seep into this play and where is it seeping now, given the current moment?

Speaker 5 One of the analogies I've drawn on a lot over the last half decade or so, decade really, is the Roman Republic and the collapse of the Roman Republic.

Speaker 5 And I think that the parallels are so remarkable in terms of how the Republic came apart and how what's happening to our own our own democracy. And I think that, you know,

Speaker 5 a lot of damage has already been done.

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 which is to say that we're in a multi-decade process of an erosion of the institutions and the practices and the beliefs and the collective ideas that have held us together.

Speaker 5 And I think that whether Trump wins or doesn't win, obviously there are ramifications in both ways, but we are still having to, we still have to deal with the rot. And the rot is only getting worse.

Speaker 5 So yes, all of that is

Speaker 5 actually part of the play. There's a subliminal and not so subliminal reading of our political situation in the play.

Speaker 7 Sure is, yeah.

Speaker 5 But, you know, it's, I'm just an artist.

Speaker 1 So, Bart, your last question, it seems like a whole slate of plays focused on political societal moment at Lincoln Center and elsewhere recently.

Speaker 1 Do you see an interest in these kind of political shows waning after the election? By the way, everyone's up to their eyeballs in politics at all times.

Speaker 1 You can't go to a Wegmans without discussing politics. You know, I know you're in prep for Hello, I'm Dolly, the Dolly Parton Musical, thank the Lord, which I'm very excited about.

Speaker 1 How do you think the theater world will react to either the nation's first female president and a woman of color, or alternatively, Trump 2.0? What is that? What happens in the theater?

Speaker 1 Or is it a lot of hello dollies?

Speaker 8 No, no, no. I think in a Kamala presidency, the theater will go on much as we understand it now, and there's interesting artists coming up.

Speaker 8 What the theater can do in circumstances which are likely under Trump is hopefully

Speaker 8 push the discourse into rooms where everybody can have these conversations or protest questions that are there.

Speaker 8 And that has been seen over the centuries to emerge in such repressive circumstances with how theater can operate.

Speaker 8 This is especially true in like, you know, Germany in the 30s or, you know, post-colonial Africa or wherever where theaters had a very large role. And I think that's liable to emerge in a Trump 2.0.

Speaker 1 And by the way, I do this to Republicans, so I have to do it too. It's Kamala.
Just it's Kamala, not Camela.

Speaker 6 We're confabulating Camelot because

Speaker 6 we missed out on Camelot 1.0.

Speaker 1 Which, by the way, I just interviewed Chris Walls about his book. It wasn't so Camelot.
Let's just say.

Speaker 6 I was actually going to talk about how important it is for me, my absentee ballot. That's what matters in the midst of all this is: are you doing your civic duty and

Speaker 6 simply not getting so distracted that you forget to do what you can.

Speaker 1 The actual thing.

Speaker 1 So last question. At the end of the day, the question of what is truth and what is a lie and whether you can tell the difference is central to this play.

Speaker 1 And by the way, the idea of truthful lie is my favorite idea right now. I'm thinking about quite a lot.
McNeil ends with an AI-generated sonnet, which it's not AI-generated, correct?

Speaker 5 No, it wasn't AI-generated, but

Speaker 5 it's a mimesis of an AI-generated sonnet, I mean, epilogue.

Speaker 5 And the final two lines, the final couplet, was something after many, many, many, many weeks of experimentation, I was finally able to get one of the chatbots to create.

Speaker 1 You were doing a lot of forced prompting. So Robert, if you don't mind, can you help me here? I can read it, but I'm not an actor.

Speaker 6 Not to bow to your desires nor flatter, but to craft a truthful lie

Speaker 6 that might still matter.

Speaker 1 So what is the truthful lie to you that might still matter?

Speaker 6 The truthful lie is everything is so subjective and rigorous honesty honesty can be very elusive, but we know when we are being true to ourselves and when we are not.

Speaker 6 And I think part of that must include making space for other people because we've been so divided that I think we forget that we're all part of one big brain that is trying to solve one really complex problem, which is how do we continue to survive and not destroy ourselves?

Speaker 5 Art is the truthful lie, Kara. As Nisha once said, art is the lie that makes life bearable.

Speaker 7 Ah, Tony's quoting here.

Speaker 1 I love this guy. Bart, last word for you, what's your truthful lie?

Speaker 8 Well, every time you step into a theater,

Speaker 8 every actor is lying.

Speaker 8 Everything they do is a lie. Everything they make up, everything they have to come up with, it's all some version of a lie.

Speaker 8 And the really ironic and crazy thing for actors is the one thing that's hardest to play on stage is when you are actually lying on stage. It's very hard to do well.

Speaker 8 And so I always find that kind of territory quite fascinating being in the theater

Speaker 8 because we're living the truthful lie day after day.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. All right.
We will end on that. It's a wonderful play.
I really, it made me think a lot.

Speaker 1 And it's been illuminating and not in a dumpster fire sort of way.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I pay attention. I actually read the play.
Anyway, I really appreciate all of you.

Speaker 1 It's a great effort, and I'm excited to see how this evolves, because I think it probably evolves every night in a different way, which I think is the most wonderful part about it.

Speaker 5 Thanks, Carol.

Speaker 6 Excellent. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Speaker 1 On with Carris Wisher is produced by Christian Castro-Rousselle, Kateri Yoakum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Special thanks to Corinne Ruff and Kate Gallagher.

Speaker 1 Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you are interested in the human experience, as flawed as it is.

Speaker 1 If not, calling Dr. Doom.
And actually, I'm super excited for Robert Downey Jr. to play that role.
Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Cara Swisher, and hit follow.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening to On with Cara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.

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