AI Looked at My Plays and Got Weird With It
To mark the end of our 2023 season, I decided to do something a little... unexpected.
I took a handful of photos from our theatre and film productions — moments full of emotion, movement, and chaos — and asked RunwayML, an AI image generator, to read them and combine them with a new prompt so that it can reinterpret them.
The results? Strange, surreal, haunting — and kind of beautiful. Here’s a thread that will absolutely mess with your head:
The next prompt: "Two people listen as one vents his fears, it’s all screams and tons of suspense”. This one is from “de Amores & Zombies”:
The next one is from “El Último Inventor”: “Philo Farnsworth (Paolo Salinas) creates the first ever television transmitter... but things quickly spiral into a culinary explosion.”:
The next one is also from “de Amores & Zombies”: "A story centered on the conflict between a father and his son, alone in a lighthouse..."
In this one, it’s honestly unclear whether the weapon Jesus Suadi is carrying in “El Show Que Sale Mal” is a gun, a sword... or some other kind of madness:
The incredible Majo Bustamante faints in “El Show Que Sale Mal” - and takes everyone down with her, fusing them into a single chaotic entity:
Here it just jump-cuts into another stage where Florence (Dinora Alfaro) becomes an opera singer mid-anxiety attack:
It makes you think… AI is managing to read and interpret everything so well because these photos are transmitting a thousand emotions.
Credit to the genius eye of our photographer René Figueroa, who captured these spectacular images.
Here’s Regina Cañas from “El Último Inventor”:
It’s scary to think about where technology is taking us.
But one thing I know for sure...
… Theatre isn’t going to die. You can’t replace it. You can’t generate it. Theatre is us — all of us who step on stage, live, to share our most intimate and truthful emotions
In a world racing toward simulation, theatre remains one of the last sacred spaces where truth is not coded, but lived. No matter how advanced the technology becomes, it cannot replicate the trembling silence before a line is spoken, the shared heartbeat between actor and audience, or the raw vulnerability of a body attempting to be seen. What AI creates may imitate the surface — but the soul of theatre is born in the unrepeatable moment, and that, by nature, cannot be generated.
More stories soon.
