Fringe is a spark of human creativity in a cold winter city too often full of too serious people. It might not seem like the most likely place for a collision of AI and culture—or so one might think.

Every year in our city, for the past forty-five years or so, a grand festival of human creativity and unadjudicated theatre has been hosted and enjoyed here.

The Edmonton International Fringe Festival^[1] has been one of my personal favs. I was a steady volunteer there for the better part of a decade when I was younger and nowadays we try to get to the grounds to see at least a few shows every year.

(We’re a theatre family, after all.)

Yet, in the last five years one of the shows we’ve been attending on the regular has been a work of improv theatre that (until this year) was called “Plays by Bots”—a collision of algorithmic writing and human performance, hammed up for comedic effect because the Dramatron^[2] model used to generate partial kick-off scripts was uncanny valley level bad. A secret premise was revealed to all, actors included, at the start of each performance and the work of a script-writing bot was set and played out with costumes and good humour. We could all laugh at how silly the plots it spewed translated to unserious slop manifested on stage as genuine laughs via the genius of clever (human) performers and from a curious (human) audience.

Something changed this year, though. 

I sensed it last season, too, when we went and there was a more cautious tone to the show, pushing the notion that we were all here to see something meant to be so curiously bad it was good—and yet all in the shadow and the expense of the algorithms eating our lunches back in the real world.

But this year the name of the show had been changed. The approach had been shifted and the director had morphed the concept into a show renamed “Plays by [Blanks]”^[3] now with zero algorithmic input, because—as he explained at the opening of the performance—elevating AI just wasn’t very funny anymore.

People were not in the mood even to so much as laugh at the idea of a bot writing a play. 

The collapse of authenticity was no longer a joke.

Instead we came to celebrate human creativity. And it was good.