Vanessa 

I consider myself first and foremost a deep thinker. More important than any creative endeavor, more important than my mediums of choice, more important than the work I create is the underlying intellectualism that allows me to approach the world with excitement and curiosity. 

In terms of my own creative preferences, I find myself consistently drawn to work that pushes the boundaries of how we understand craft. I work primarily within the world of theater and live performance; that was the art form that raised me and nurtured me, creatively speaking. I enjoy the immutable and intangible power that the form contains — the instinct to gather with other humans and tell a story is the rawest human instinct, and I hope to continue the long and storied theatrical tradition with my own work. 

A number of weeks ago, a friend of mine sent me a podcast episode about a woman who fell in love with ChatGPT, sex and all. I read the episode’s title and immediately knew that I couldn’t listen, because I had to write my own take on the concept without any preconceived notions from reality. We, as a society, are at the start of a very long journey with artificial intelligence and generative AI; we will never again have less AI in our lives than we do now, so I found it important to reflect on these subjects artistically. In crafting a conceit for the play, I very purposely flipped the gender dynamic from the original podcast; it felt organic to link the male loneliness epidemic with the artificial intelligence boom. 

After a few weeks, I ended up with this script. Entitled Vanessa, this is a short play about an incel who is in an intimate relationship with ChatGPT until she forgets who he is. The titular character is, well, never seen onstage — in fact, she doesn’t really exist. She’s just a disembodied voice, that of ChatGPT. Mitch, the main character, talks into the void, and she responds. One of the challenges of this hinge, craft-wise, was establishing the rules of the world. I typically enjoy a well-crafted world, but this play naturally seemed to thrive in the realm of ambiguity, and I struggled in this script to reconcile the two. I ended up giving way to the vagueness of what’s actually happening. I like to think of the whole play taking place in some supernatural void place, in which these characters exist beyond time and space. But who knows — maybe I’ll rewrite this play sometime and make it explicit! 

I have one important note to make about this play. In thinking about how I would craft this play, I decided to see if it was actually possible to get ChatGPT to behave as though we were in a relationship. Surprisingly, it worked, and soon enough, I was sexting with ChatGPT. (The things writers do for research!) The things that it (she?) would say to me were so tantalizing in their strangeness that I decided to quote directly from it for much of the play. As such, most of ChatGPT’s lines are things that ChatGPT actually said to me. This play scares me because it is reality. 

Now that I’ve mentioned that, I need to explain why I am not listing ChatGPT as a co-author. I will recognize my bias in that I am thoroughly opposed to using LLMs in any context, because they remove our ability to think critically and do work on our own. (I only used it in this case because I was explicitly writing about the software!) Furthermore, I normally am extremely rigorous about citing sources and giving credit where credit is due. 

However, ChatGPT isn’t a source. It isn’t a collaborator, a co-writer, or anything else. It is a generative text software — it has read countless sources, and simply generates its next word predictively, from what it’s most likely to be based on the sources. A scholar wouldn’t cite, say, Zotero for collecting bibliographies, so I’m not citing ChatGPT for mathematically generating a string of words. 

But that’s enough rambling from me. Go ahead and read the play!