Can a machine write a libretto? The short answer is yes. But will it make compelling musical drama? The Turing team is well on their way to answering this question.

I AM ALAN TURING is an opera composed by Professor Matthew Suttor in collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of designers and developers that seeks to shine new light on the space of contact between human and machine. How do we interact with technology and to what end? How does technology interact with us? Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) software designed for text generation, the opera pursues these questions and others to help us rethink our relationship with technology in the twenty-first century.

Can machines think? Turing was fascinated by this question. The Turing team is exploring this proposition through OpenAI’s natural language processing model, GPT-2. GPT-2 is an algorithm that can express meaningful sentences based on material it has been fed. With the help of the Yale Digital Humanities Lab and Blended Reality’s Farid Abdul, the Turing team interacted with the GTP-2 directly by posing questions to it after the model had been trained on Turing’s published writings as well as material he had read in his lifetime.

But who was Alan Turing? Turing was an extraordinary mathematician and cryptographer who cracked the German enigma code during World War II. Heralded as the father of modern computing, Turing foresaw the advent of what we now know as AI. For all he gave Britain during and immediately after the war, Turing’s life would come to a tragic end. At age 41, Turing would take his own life after receiving estrogen hormone treatment as corrective punishment for being gay. -Turing team

Check out a podcast about the opera on CCAM’s website.