AI meets art in McNeal: Akhtar’s play challenges limits of creativity

This summer, Ayad Akhtar was struggling with the final scene of McNeal, his knotty and disorienting play about a Nobel Prize-winning author who uses artificial intelligence to write a novel.

He wanted the title character, played by Robert Downey Jr in his Broadway debut, to deliver a monologue that sounded like a computer wrote it. So Akhtar uploaded what he had written into ChatGPT, gave the program a list of words, and told it to produce a speech in the style of Shakespeare. The results were so compelling that he read the speech to the cast at the next rehearsal.