I might just need to get this image out of my head, but …
TechCrunch has a piece on Doomers, a play that’s “loosely based on Sam Altman’s ousting as CEO of OpenAI” in late 2023. I have a lot of feelings about the premise, poster, and presumably non-rhetorical question (In humanity’s last act … who plays God?) posed by the play.
On the one hand, I’m a wanna-be fiction writer at heart. I admire and respect the hell out of anyone who can write a good story, let alone have the vision and drive to stage the thing and see it through to opening night.
A close family friend is a playwright. He’s really, really good. And he nailed the dysfunction of social media in a particularly hilarious scene in one of his plays as shown below.
(Eureka Day, image via New York Times)
So I know it can be done, capturing the zeitgeist — even our screens always on, technology-mediated zeitgeist — in a written story or live stage production.
But on the other hand, it’s really hard to do, writing a great work of fiction, let alone a play about the zeitgeist in our age of AI and TikTok and such. I’m not a huge theater-goer, but I’ve seen some baaaad plays in my time. Which makes me less than optimistic about Doomers. That said, I’m not familiar with the play’s author Matthew Gasda, nor his other works, so I’m reserving judgement and really hoping I’m wrong.
And I have seen some great plays in my life, too. So I’ll keep an open mind.
Doomers apparently takes place just after the main character, Seth the CEO of MindMesh (eg, Sam the CEO of OpenAI?) is fired by the company board. The play is inspired by the OpenAI events but uses them mainly as a backdrop for exploring philosophical questions, according to TechCrunch. Events that transpire onstage are fictional, and don’t attempt to write any sort of record of what really happened at OpenAI a year or so ago.
As TechCrunch writes:
Seth, the character based on Altman, chooses to win.
He declares loudly that the board fired him “for creating miracles,” and argues that alignment would be a “poor use of a sacred resource.” It is human, he says, to pursue excellence and adds that MindMesh is the world’s “immune system,” a benevolent American-made AGI that will protect us when the “bad” AGI goes rogue.
“The only thing to do is outcompete and out-engineer,” Seth says. Characters based on Mira Murati and Greg Brockman largely back Seth, even as he insults them, arguing for a vision of an AI utopia where technology cures disease and opens up interplanetary space travel. To which the safety ethicist character, Alina, says, “You make it sound like a genie in a bottle.”
I’ve always loved cyberpunk and other near-term and speculative fiction in its many forms, mainly books and tv shows/movies. So, in theory, I’m all for projects like Doomers that seek to explore the risks and rewards of pursuing the next big thing.
That said, I don’t know what actually happened with Altman and Open AI. But I get why, if you were going to create a work of fiction based around a very lightly disguised real CEO of a real AI company, you’d base it around them. He and they are still very much (one of?) the mainstream public faces of AI. Audiences can relate.
At least enough to double-take at the poster art. And that image I need to get out of my head.
No, it’s not a Last Supper reference, or even the faint Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs vibes I get from “Seth’s” laptop and the grainy filter applied to everything.
It’s this:
Sam Altman. “Seth.” Seth Cohen.
Any OC fans out there? Too far of a stretch?
Me, I’ll never unsee it.
Happy Friday 