How AI is Disrupting the Literary World

This summer, Ayad Akhtar was struggling with the final scene of McNeal, his knotty and disorienting play about a Nobel Prize-winning author who uses artificial intelligence to write a novel.

- ALEXANDRA ALTER

This summer, Ayad Akhtar was struggling with the final scene of McNeal, his knotty and disorienting play about a Nobel Prize-winning author who uses artificial intelligence to write a novel.

He wanted the title character, played by Robert Downey Jr. in his Broadway debut, to deliver a monologue that sounded like a computer wrote it. So Akhtar uploaded what he had written into ChatGPT, gave the program a list of words, and told it to produce a speech in the style of Shakespeare. The results were so compelling that he read the speech to the cast at the next rehearsal.

"Their jaws dropped," Akhtar said. "It had preserved the speech that I wrote, using those words in such fascinating ways that it was astonishing to everybody there."

Ultimately, Akhtar used only two of the chatbot's lines. But his attempt to mimic AI-generated text—an oddly circular process of a human imitating a computer's imitation of a human—had an uncanny effect: Downey's delivery of the final speech feels both intimate and strangely disembodied.

McNeal is meant to be a bewildering, unsettling experience, and some critics have concluded it overdelivers on that promise. The play, set in the near future, centers on an entitled, self-absorbed, hard-drinking novelist named Jacob McNeal, who, having reached the apex of his career, proceeds to unravel.

Based partly on larger-than-life literary giants like Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, McNeal seems bent on self-immolation. He passes his dead wife's manuscript off as his own. He mixes staggering amounts of alcohol with prescription drugs, triggering hallucinations.