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"Computers are stupid!" Robert Downey Jr. says with a shrug between sips of coffee in the cozy lounge of an uptown Manhattan hotel. This was his first thought after reading the script for McNeal, the gripping new play by Ayad Akhtar starring the actor and currently running at the Lincoln Center Theater. Downey plays Jacob McNeal, a prize-winning novelist grappling with his own mortality and the looming death of his career, a consequence of various misdeeds, personal and professional, not least of which is leaning on AI to write his latest novel.
The slick production, directed by Bartlett Sher, is a meditation on the ethical dilemma that arises when technology offers (or threatens) to replace human creativity. If software is learning to write books that sound like our favorite author, when do we stop caring who wrote them?
But from Downey's perspective, the AI pearl clutchers are getting ahead of themselves: "It still feels like what I thought computers were able to do 20 years ago," he says. "It's not that good. If it was very good, then we wouldn't be scared. We would be fucking replaced."