End of tedium? How AI impacts the creative sector

CHATGPT may be all the rage now, but some Singapore creatives have been working with artificial intelligence (AI) content-generation tools long before this. In 2021, actor-playwright-director Liu Xiaoyi was already writing theatre plays using AI tools InferKit and Caiyun Xiaomeng for English and Mandarin scripts respectively.

Liu, who is well-regarded in the theatre circles, wanted to see if these AI tools could rival the scripts written by humans. So he commissioned four human playwrights to each write a script – two were in English, two in Mandarin – and then worked with the aforementioned AI platforms to also generate two English and two Mandarin scripts.

In early 2022, he invited an audience to a reading of the eight scripts by actors. The audience was then asked to guess whether the scripts were human- or machine-generated. “Most of the guesses were correct,” says Liu. “But some of the AI-generated scripts actually passed the Turing test.” The Turing test was established by English scientist Alan Turing in 1950, which stated that a computer can be said to possess signs of human intelligence if its responses are mistaken for human more than 30 per cent of the time.