TATPIS 2025
The Fourth Annual Conference of Taiwan Association for Theatre and Performance Industry Studies
From Ji/Yi to AI: Technology, Arts and Theatre Industry
11th-13th July 2025: Weiwuying, National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, Taiwan
INFORMATION AND REGISTRATION HERE.

I am happy to be giving a paper at the forthcoming TATPIS conference.

CONFERENCE PAPER
Actors, AI and Audiences: Relationships of Non-Belief

This paper considers the idea that our experience of being an audience of theatre (or drama more generally) can help us untangle the psychic muddle when engaging with the apparently human but nevertheless non-human ‘other’ that is the chatbot, suddenly already so much a part of our daily lives.

The AI technological revolution has sparked considerable discussion about the risks of machine intelligence. Chat GPT talks to us as if it were our Research Assistant, chatbots like Replika offer themselves to us as mentors, friends, lovers, and even as our spouse. These developments have prompted a concern about sentient machines: that the ‘robots will take over’. Most technologists agree that artificial general intelligence is not immanent but regardless, our human tendency is to anthropomorphise wherever there is a chance.

“Despite being mindless machines, consumers nevertheless routinely attribute humanlike mental capacities of intentions, beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge to them.”(Epley p.591)

We perceive human traits in an abundance of non-human agents.

The threat then is not so much that the machine is thinking but rather that we think it is.

“The real issue, in other words, is the ease with which people anthropomorphize or project human features onto our technologies, rather than the machines’ actual personhood.” (Eisikovits par.18)

This leads to what Nir Eisikovits calls “the real risks of psychological entanglement” with a “predatory technology that can easily take advantage of human [beings]” (Eisikovits pars. 24/31).

Looking to works of performance, especially ones in which the issue of ‘belief’ and ‘non-belief’ are placed at the forefront, may help us calibrate the “risks of psychological entanglement” with AI interfaces. Choy Ka Fai’s Yishun is Burning, part of CosmicWander (2020-2024+), is a performance in which gods are made manifest by dancers on stage whose bodies are linked through motion capture technologies to cybernetic screen incarnations. The “hypermediacy” (Bolter & Grusin) of Choy’s approach, in which the act of representation is itself made visible (drawing attention to its own construction), allows us to hold together both an experience of the god and, simultaneously, the artwork that made them manifest.

The audience experience of a performance like Yishun is Burning helps us to think about the congruence and divergence of imagination and belief. The philosopher Anna Ichino argues that while clearly different, imagination and belief “do not differ in emotional and cognitive outputs” (Ichino p.17). We may or may not believe in the god made manifest or the sentience of our chatbot interlocutor – but we don’t need to. We don’t need to make it a matter of belief.

REFERENCES
Eisikovits, Nir (2023) ‘AI isn’t close to becoming sentient – the real danger lies in how easily we’re prone to anthropomorphize it’ in The Conversation (published March 15, 2023) https://theconversation.com/ai-isnt-close-to-becoming-sentient-the-real-danger-lies-in-how-easily-were-prone-to-anthropomorphize-it-200525 Viewed September 19, 2024.

Epley, Nicholas (2018) ‘A Mind like Mine: The Exceptionally Ordinary Underpinnings of Anthropomorphism’ in The Science of Extraordinary Beliefs, Journal of the Association for Consumer Research Volume 3, Number 4, October 2018. Guest Editors: Pankaj Aggarwal, Lauren Block, Thomas Kramer, and Ann L. McGill.

Ichino, Anna (2019) ‘Imagination and Belief in Action’, in Philosophia https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-019-00067-7