AI comedy “Sophia or The End of the Humanists” by Moritz Rinke: criticism

Artificial intelligence has long since found its way into the theater, not only as an aid in work processes and as part of an often virtuoso virtual stage design. But as a topic, sometimes even in person. This is from Ayad Akhtar’s Broadway play „McNeal”, in which a successful writer uses AI tools and thus raises the question of literary authorship, all the way to gloomy scenarios of doom, such as those drawn up by Sibylle Berg in “It can only get better”. In “It Says It Loves Us,” the new play by Emre Akal, an AI-controlled care robot suddenly develops feelings. In “KI essen soule auf (ORPHEAI)” by Thomas Köck, it is the AI ​​itself that speaks – as a nasty cyber-hyperhuman who pours out speech codes. And in “Nessun Dorma” at the Magdeburg Theater in 2022, there were no longer any people on stage, but two machines in the love discourse: Arka and Putzini, an industrial robot and a mopping robot.