If there’s one thing that everybody seems to be talking about right now, it’s Artificial Intelligence (AI). Revolutionising the world as we know it, AI has already changed so many industries and when I heard that Improbotics theatre company was utilising AI and robotics in their show at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, I was so intrigued. I had the opportunity to ask company co-founder, show director and research scientist Dr Piotr Mirowski some questions about ‘RoboTales’ and find out how the production is combining AI and improv.
You are back at the Edinburgh Fringe for 2025, combining technological innovation with human performance in the improvised ‘RoboTales’. How are you feeling about presenting a new show at the festival this year?
As a science comedy troupe, we are immensely excited at the general audience reception of our new show, and we treat a long run at Edinburgh Fringe as an opportunity to experiment. Over the course of 19 performances, we will use the scientific method to formulate hypotheses of what works and what does not, and we will make small adjustments to the show. A few months ago, we premiered our new show at an international improv festival in Oslo, Norway, and then had short preview runs in Brighton and London. In technology parlance, these performances were our “beta testing”: Edinburgh will be our general release!
What can you tell me about how the actors interact with A.L.Ex, the humanoid robot?
The show presents many ways we engage with the robot.
We start with the simplest one: A.L.Ex is present on stage as a small humanoid robot on stage, with whom we improvise a chat. A.L.Ex can hear us and process what we say thanks to an AI system I have designed and built around speech recognition and various chatbots, and it can express itself via words and by moving its robotic limbs and head – illustrating our collective ability to anthropomorphise a decidedly cute robot.
Then we replace the physical robot with a human “Cyborg” – an actor who takes their lines from AI via augmented reality glasses displaying AI-generated lines, added physicality, emotional expression, interpretation and subtext – uniquely human skills. Our system is as an actor training technique of sorts, with actors cold reading sometimes absurdist text, with the rest of the cast always finding a way to justify those lines according to improv principles, and doing the leg work of providing A.L.Ex with interesting and very specific context. We are often delightfully surprised when A.L.Ex says something interesting that was not in our dialogue and setup.
We have a deep fake based game, but I do not want to spoil it before you see the show.
And the pièce de résistance of the show is our brand-new improvised choose-your-own adventure game, with audience participation. A.L.Ex uses speech recognition and a piece of software I spent months developing, to analyse the improv scenes and generate new choices and scene transitions. The audiences control the story by voting on their phones for their preferred choice (like a modern take on your childhood’s choose-your-own adventure books), and then the actors take the story forward.
The show involves audience interaction in the form of suggestions, voting and the creation of unexpected deep fakes of consenting spectators. To what extent does this create a truly unique theatrical experience?
Improvised theatre is an inherently interactive performance, but audience participation can be an interesting challenge, as improvisers both want engagement and maintaining the flow of the performance. Our earlier shows were closer to short-form improv, and we have revised our philosophy to enable moments of grounded and connected performance between the actors. First we introduced a moment in the show where we can engage in a deep dialogue with one specific audience member. For this run of RoboTales, we have also created an interactive voting system, where the audience controls the long-form improvised narrative by periodically voting among two choices – generated by a complex AI that is analysing the story to predict what could happen next. It is like watching a live version of “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch”, brought to life by AI and the actors’ imagination and improv talent – as soon as the audience has voted, the story continues in the chosen direction.
How did audiences react to the show at Brighton Fringe?
Critic Peter Allinson from The Brighton & Hove News, apparently described me as a “self confessed nerd, who gives off the vibe of an enthusiastic mad scientist, someone who loves the potential of the robotic world”. I love that description, because it conveys the level of my enthusiasm! In my eyes, the common aspect of theatre (and improvisation in particular) and of robotics is the joy to try and to explore, to fail and to succeed, with new approaches and new tools. “It is the technology that makes [our] show different”: we are a theatre lab, exploring different games that can challenge us as performers. The review concluded with: “Overall, the humans appear to be the winners. AI might be able to copy, create and generate, but it is the actors who can subvert and respond in ways it could never expect.” – this beautifully summarises our human agency.
To what extent have you noticed an uptick in interest in your theatre making since Artificial Intelligence became a household topic?
We started back in 2016, where the public perception of AI was shaped by the Terminator franchise. The world was such a simpler place back then… At that time, our show was about demystifying the strange tools of AI, perhaps to slightly smaller audiences.
We had an uptick of interest in 2023, following the wide public access to generative AI and new types of concerns about bias in AI tools and their impact on the creative ecosystem. Today, our show is all about interrogating audiences about human agency in creative uses of AI, and about demonstrating dual uses of such technology as deep fakes.
How are you trying to shape public perception of AI in your work?
I would love to quote poet and software engineer Allison Parrish (www.decontextualize.com) who presented and disputed two fallacies about AI in artistic work. The first fallacy is that “creative labour can be automated” and that AI can in any way replace artists. The second fallacy is that “writing a computer program to generate aesthetic artefacts is not in itself a creative process” (assuming, of course, that one does more than just type a prompt into a generative AI system).
On the first subject, I want audiences to have faith in human creativity in the age of AI. Like every Edinburgh punter knows, we are here to experience the art made by vulnerable human beings, and to connect to their lived human experience, which simply cannot be automated, no matter how advanced AI technology will become. I am trying to give audiences back confidence in the uniqueness of the human experience.
On the second subject: I love creative coding and building robots for performance, because these are strange tools whose default behaviour is to disobey your instructions—until you realise you made a bug in your code that you need to fix. Theatre can be a great playground for pioneering technologies: lights, projections, immersive installations, and now robots. It is even more appropriate that the word “robot” was actually first coined on the theatre stage in the theatre play “R.U.R. – Rossum’s Universal Robots”, which was written over 100 years ago by Czech playwright Karel Čapek. We hope the audiences take away a “maker” mindset that is common to both improvisation and to tinkering with robots and technology. The show features very real and very fragile technology, deployed in the extreme conditions of a Fringe venue, with any tech issues being fixed live. If standard improv is like building a plane in mid-flight, our show adds having to wrangle a mischievous autopilot. The best compliments we received were from audience members who told us they were inspired to dare and try something new.
Robotics at the Edinburgh Fringe
It has been absolutely fascinating to hear more about ‘RoboTales’ from Piotr, specifically the fusion of technology and human creativity. I look forward to hearing how audiences react to the show in Scotland this Summer. I’m sure A.L.Ex will delight spectators. You can see Improbotics in action at the Nip venue at Gilded Balloon Patter House from 30th July to 17th August. Performances start daily at 19:40, with tickets available via the festival’s website.
Thanks for reading my blog today.
Love Kat xxxx
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