AI and Art

At the heart of Art by Yasmina Reza is a painting. One man buys it. His friend hates it. They quarrel. A third friend takes the side of whoever seems to be winning. Amid the comedy and drama, the play leaves us with a lingering question: What is good art?

To that, we might add a more contemporary question: Can AI create good art?

It’s perhaps fitting—maybe even ironic—that our poster for Art was generated by AI, a first for us.

My prompt to ChatGPT was simple:

"Make me a poster for the play Art by Yasmina Reza. Show drafts."

ChatGPT's first attempt was not bad. A few refinements later, it produced something I could work with.

But does this process, and the final result, count as art? The poster is visually appealing. It captures an aspect of the play. But is it truly art?

Critics argue that art requires intentionality — something AI lacks. An artist sets out to express a vision, an emotion, or a story through a chosen medium. AI, on the other hand, merely responds to a prompt.

Yet, with a prompt as high-level as what I gave it, is it really so different from what I would have told a human designer?

Here's another example of a high-level prompt to DeepSeek (courtesy Ethan Mollick):

"Do something to delight me in exactly 7 words. Make it not cheesy. This is important."

DeepSeek's response in the screenshot below includes its Chain-of-thought reasoning. Read it and tell me that is not the way an artist thinks. And its output? Genuinely creative.

Today, AI can produce images, videos, music, and even creative writing. Much of it is uninspired and banal. But it’s improving at an astonishing pace.

BADCo has used AI mainly on the non-artistic side of our theatre – like for marketing blurbs for our shows. Once, we used AI-generated music as our pre-show house music. But on the artistic side, our use of AI has been limited — mostly for script translations. AI isn’t writing great plays yet. But I hear it’s helping authors write entire novels. Can a full-length script be far behind?

Going forward, artists will increasingly use AI as a tool to extend their craft. And AI itself will continue to evolve, producing work that challenges our understanding of creativity. In digitized forms of art—painting, music, writing, even film—the lines will blur faster than we expect.

Meanwhile, for those of us in theatre and the performing arts, the human element remains irreplaceable. The stage is where we make the last stand against our future AI overlords.

"Until," as my wife says, "the androids are here."

Watch Art. Tickets are on sale now. None of the actors are androids.

This post was written by Basab Pradhan and refined by ChatGPT