“AIrish”: Exploring Irish Theater and Artificial Intelligence

Collective life and individual subjectivity are increasingly routed through and constituted by data and digital space. Meanwhile, the use of AI increases in nearly every domain of human endeavor. How are areas of culture that we understand to be deeply human—the arts, creativity, the humanities—reshaping and reshaped by ever-improving forms of machine intelligence? How can theater respond to machine learning? What would it mean to read or write a play composed by artificial intelligence?

Peter Glazer (Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies) will talk with Catherine Flynn (Department of English, Director of Irish Studies) about AIrish, Flynn’s research project that blends traditional and digital humanities methods to explore Irish drama from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. The conversation will focus on an undergraduate seminar Flynn taught during the Spring 2021 semester on a set of Irish plays, using computational analyses to enhance the discussions of dramatic works that span 250 years. Flynn and Glazer will also discuss the plays the students composed using lines from plays on the syllabus, lines composed by an AI text-generator, and lines of their own composition.

For details, visit: https://ies.berkeley.edu/irish/airish