YSM Issue 97.1

Social Technology
FOCUS
I AM ALAN
TURING
How Opera Uses AI to
Tell Turing’s Story
BY XIMENA LEYVA PERALTA
IMAGE COURTESY OF JEAN-FRANÇOIS MONETTE
C
omposer Matthew Suttor and the team of artists and
programmers behind the experimental opera I AM ALAN
TURING have welcomed artificial intelligence (AI) as a
collaborator. The opera’s libretto blends human-generated and
machine-generated lyrics and dialogues to explore the life and ideas
of brilliant computer scientist Alan Turing. Supported by Yale’s Center
for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM), the project presents a new
model for creating opera in the information age and explores what it
means to be human in light of AI.
Suttor, program manager at CCAM and senior lecturer in Theater
and Performance Studies at Yale, was amazed by Turing’s insights on AI
while exploring the archive at King’s College, Cambridge, a few years
ago. In his 1951 lecture “Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory,”
Turing argued that it is possible to construct machines that closely
simulate human behavior. Yet, humans should not be afraid of being
replaced. “There would be plenty to do, trying to understand what the
machines were trying to say,” Turing wrote.
Renowned for his work on deciphering Nazi codes during World War
II, Turing laid the groundwork for modern computing and AI. In 1936,
he introduced the first theoretical description of a computer, the Turing
machine. In 1950, he proposed the Turing test, which gauges how well a
machine can think like a human. If a human cannot distinguish between
the answers of a machine and another human, then the machine has
passed the test.
Suttor first proposed the opera to a group of collaborators in 2019.
“Right from the very beginning, there was this idea of the opera being
some kind of Turing test for the audience, so it had this meta kind of
framework,” Suttor said. It was then that Smita Krishnaswamy, associate
professor of genetics and computer science at Yale, introduced Suttor
and his team to representatives of OpenAI.
At the time, GPT-2 was OpenAI’s latest large language model (LLM)—
an AI trained to understand and generate natural language—but it lacked
chat capabilities like its famous successor, ChatGPT. With assistance
from Yale University Library’s Digital Humanities Lab, Suttor’s team
created an interface to interact with GPT-2. Through Zoom calls in 2020,
the team trained the model on various large text datasets and fine-tuned
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it using Turing’s writings. They then posed direct yet philosophically
profound questions to the model, such as “Can computers think?” They
experimented with different settings of temperature—the randomness
of the output—and the number of characters produced, and they almost
immediately obtained interesting answers.
The team embraced the AI as an artistic collaborator. “Asking
questions is also a form of training,” Suttor said. “Interacting with an
LLM forces you to ask better questions.” Discussing the AI’s outputs was
extremely valuable for the team from a pedagogical point of view and
was a powerful exercise in collaboration.
The opera’s title originated from one of their earliest conversations
with GPT-2. When asked to produce lyrics for a “sexy” song about
Turing, the AI came up with “I’m a Turing machine, Baby.” The AI is
so integrated into the opera that even Suttor and his team cannot tell
machine-generated text apart from human-generated text.
Beyond the libretto, the opera incorporates AI and aspects of Turing’s
work in other areas. Some AI-generated images of Turing, Suttor, and his
team are used throughout the production. GPT-2 was also used to write
code snippets for creating animations featured during the performance.
Even Turing’s later works on mathematical biology come into play.
Based on Turing’s diagrams of spiral patterns in sunflower seeds, Suttor
created unique harmonic progressions by tracing equivalent spirals onto
the circle of fifths, a method of organizing pitches in music theory. These
progressions underpin much of the opera.
Suttor and his team recently presented a work-in-progress
performance of I AM ALAN TURING at the CCAM as part of the
Machine as Medium Symposium: Matter and Spirit. The event explored
how AI and creativity intersect and give rise to new approaches to
timeless questions about human existence.
In its current form, the opera spans eight music pieces across various
genres, but there’s still more work to be done. Suttor is excited to see how
the project continues to evolve through workshops and collaborations
between humans and machines. In light of the latest AI surge, I AM
ALAN TURING serves as a testament to Turing’s enduring influence
and the boundless possibilities when art and technology converge to
explore the essence of humanity. ■
March 2024 Yale Scientific Magazine 11