The Playwright in the Age of AI

In his new play, McNeal, Ayad Akhtar confronts, and subverts, the idea that artificial intelligence threatens human ingenuity.

- Jetirey Goldberg

Ayad Akhtar's brilliant new play, McNeal, currently at the Lincoln Center Theater, is transfixing in part because it tracks without flinching the disintegration of a celebrated writer, and in part because Akhtar goes to a place that few writers have visited so effectively-the very near future, in which large language models threaten to undo our self-satisfied understanding of creativity, plagiarism, and originality. And also because Robert Downey Jr., performing onstage for the first time in more than 40 years, perfectly embodies the genius and brokenness of the title character.

I've been in conversation for quite some time with Akhtar, whose play Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, about artificial generative intelligence and its impact on cognition and creation. He's one of the few writers I know whose position on AI can't be reduced to the (understandable) plea For God's sake, stop threatening my existence! In McNeal, he not only suggests that LLMs might be nondestructive utilities for human writers, but also deployed LLMs as he wrote (he's used many of them, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini included). To my chagrin and astonishment, they seem to have helped him make an even better play. As you will see in our conversation, he doesn't believe that this should be controversial.