Winter Words kicks off with Ayad Akhtar

A variety of people hold strong opinions — either optimistic or pessimistic — about artificial intelligence (AI). Still others simply ignore the technology, which is so rapidly advancing. Through his most recent play, “McNeal,” Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar addresses AI as his character, novelist Jacob McNeal, grapples with the limits of creativity and AI’s possibilities.

Akhtar seems to have a knack when it comes to addressing AI through plays. “McNeal,” starring Robert Downey Jr., has broken every box office record on Broadway. Akhtar’s play “Disgraced,” about artificial generative intelligence’s impact on cognition and creation, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013.

“I’ve been seeing the advances that the large language models are making, and it was pretty startling,” he said. “It was obvious that this has an enormous impact on what I do.”

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He asserts that AI is simply another, albeit more complex and sophisticated, form of the automated cognition that we’ve been living with — and have been heavily influenced by — for 15 years. He asserts that technology has been transforming us, including our neurochemistry and society, for quite some time, from navigation to marketing to delivering goods. He points out that it entertains us, while at the same time making us less tolerant of boredom and more willing to be distracted.

“Every human activity has been reshaped by automatic cognition for a decade and a half,” he said. “The notion that somehow artificial intelligence represents a different kind of cognition than our own seems misguided. We created this, and it stems from our creativity. What I learned (in researching and interacting with GPT and other modalities) is what I already knew: So much of the process of making new connections is about recycling old connections.”

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While the play broke records, many critics viciously attacked it — and Akhtar for seemingly supporting AI. He does believe that AI is truly extraordinary, but he said his point is not to judge it.

“I’m just trying to understand what this means, what it says about us, what it says about art. It’s not my place to say if it’s good or bad. I’m more interested in knowing things than I am knowing if they’re good or bad,” he said, reiterating that, like it or not, “It’s coming; it’s a force of human ingenuity.”

However, he does point out that “we’re well into a cycle of having our humanity taken away,” saying that technology is turning humans into zombies, with a third of our time spent on screens and a third spent sleeping. Yet, he underscores the fact that AI is not worse than the automated cognition we’ve been living with for about 15 years.

“(Automated cognition) has transformed our relationships, our sexuality, our neurology — so let’s have the real conversation about that. Let’s not have some dumb conversation about artificial intelligence,” he said. “Artificial intelligence is agnostic. It will give you sh*t, or it will give you something good, and it ultimately doesn’t know the difference. It’s up to (humans) to decide.”

He believes the real danger lies in ignoring the emerging technology, which stands posed to significantly change the workplace, economy, and society.

“Vilifying it doesn’t give people an incentive (to learn) or an advantage,” he said, adding that Hollywood always has been at the epicenter of applied technology advances, from adding sound to previously silent films to employing CGI, to now using AI.

This is Akhtar’s first trip to Aspen; during his Winter Words conversation, he will tell some stories and allow plenty of time for questions since he knows there are a lot of questions, as well as fear, around the subject.