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Improvisation is a skill needed by creatives, and improv can delight theater audiences. Is improvisation the ultimate test for artificial intelligence? Since 2016, Piotr Mirowski has deployed AI as a creativity support tool for live improvised theater performances with a cast of humans and robots, engaging audiences at Edinburgh Fringe about generative AI, storytelling, and ethical co-creation with machines.

Making Stuff Up: Improvising LLMs and Spontaneous Robots

Conferences

Had some great conversations during the roundtables. How many people went? Raise your hand. Yeah, all right. They were both really good. I popped up my head into both of them. Now we're switching gears and getting a little bit more spontaneous. Our next session explores a fascinating idea. Is improvisation the ability to be funny and respond creativity cre creatively in the moment? Something that's hard for humans to get right to, in addition to speaking apparently, the ultimate test for AI to show us what that looks like in action, please join me in welcoming research scientist at Google DeepMind and director of the Improbotics Theater, Pyt Mirovski. What you gonna do? Hello, London. So, hello. Let me leave that thing and unplug the little robot and maybe say a few words about myself. I do have a day job, um, and as a matter of fact, I was studying computer science and improv for a very long time, almost like 20 years, each of those. And I did my PhD at NYU with a professor called Jan Lukan back in the time when he still had time for students and back in the time where AI was a dirty word, we had to avoid it putting in publications in order to get accepted. And in my day job I've been working on various AI research, for instance, learning to navigate or learning to predict the weather, essentially trying to make up things that happen in the future using machine learning. So that's essentially my day job, but in the evening I've been going to theater school, to drama school in London, and also doing improv comedy as well. I really love theater and I love improvisation because improvisation is one way to really engage and connect with the audience. Um, some researchers, some academics have defined improvisation as real time dynamic problem solving. Other academics like Gla Spolin and Keith Johnstone have talked about spontaneity, being a 6 year old again and doing the most obvious thing, which is surprisingly difficult once you become an adult. Improvisation is all about reacting in split seconds to whatever is thrown at you and saying the most obvious thing that comes to your mind. And if you want to see some improv in London, you can go to see our friends from showstoppers who improvise a two-hour musical, uh, every month, fully from scratch. So, this is improv. Uh, one of the reasons why improv is so valued in business environments is that it's all about collaboration and it's about learning to listen to your stage partner. So something happened in my mind about 9 years ago. I was working um at Bing. Um, at Microsoft on the 2nd most popular search engine Bing, and I was working on query autocompletion trying to basically predict what people are going to tell based on the context, and I was doing improv and then I realized that there was a strange connection being delivered two things machine learning, maximizing the likelihood, and being obvious, saying the most obvious thing on your mind, so that. How the idea of improvising with a robot came to be. So I built an AI. I trained a language model on the dialogue from 100,000 films from open subtitles. That was 8 years ago, and I brought this on stage and I called the AI and the robot Alex Artificial Language experiment. And the way this worked, I had a microphone. I would speak to the robot using speech recognition, and it would use a language motor to reply. Nothing surprising for anyone who has used an AI system in the last few years. And of course the AI would take typically, I don't know, 5 seconds to come up with an answer, which seemed an eternity on stage. So I had to actually make up for that. I was improvising alone, but soon after I met someone fantastic, Corey Matheson, a PhD student in robotics in Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, an improviser at the Rapid Fire Theater who had the same idea. So I wrote to him a 3000 word email. He flew to London the day after. We met. We became friends. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and we started working together. From Corey's perspective, improvisation. is the art of making your stage partner look good on stage. It's not about you, it's about them. He would have this shtick where he would invite someone from the audience who never did improv before, and he would make him look good, make her look good for 15 minutes on stage. So we created this company Inrobotics human Machine, and we started doing improv shows remotely via Zoom or Skype, and we had this show in London and Portland, Oregon, 8 time zones apart of that's what we thought until we realized the day before that actually, you know, daylight setting time is not always coordinated. So that created a bit of a logistical problem. And also, um, the previous show of a run, we didn't have time to check the microphone levels. The robot literally crashed and burned on stage. Everything was going wrong. And the reviewer came. And they wrote 2 stars chaotic, never worked with robots to a PhD student in robotics and to someone who was working on robots in his daytime, daytime. Did we listen? Absolutely not. So we created this theater company where we actually replaced the robot by humans, getting lines the earpiece from the AI and essentially becoming the embodiment, the cyborg, improvising with all the humans on stage, and that's how it looks in practice. We have an AI system that generates lots of candidates, lots of suggestions. There is a curator, a human in the loop who is choosing the best lines, the least offensive, or maybe the ones that make most sense, and we want to show that to the audience because we want to make sure that the audience understands that AI is not about an oracle giving an answer, but it's about a stochastic parrot generating answers all the time, and it's up to you to choose the best one. And one of the improvisers wear a headset, wears a headset, and they deliver the lines with physicality, emotional expression, etc. We have been evolving the formats. We have created 4 different companies in 4 different countries. We have been publishing academic research on the subject in human computer interaction, and we have replaced the earpieces by augmented variety glasses, which we might know later. And we have also been working on telepresence. How do we improvise during COVID where everyone is miserable at home. Everyone gets a green screen, and one of us is live video DJing us to place two improvisers on a horse or in a car or in a bathtub and see what happens next. Uh, so this is a demo of the system during COVID. We have also worked on live translation because that's the origin of large language models, translation, and we have done multilingual shows where one person may speak in Polish, another one in French, and both get understood because they have live translation. So does the audience. We have incorporated image generation, exploring PowerPoint generation, uh, you know, improvised TED Talks, PowerPoint karaoke made by AI. Or even incorporated deep fakes in a very consensual way to basically inform the audience about the potential to actually get a live deep fake in real time and to explore maybe a more fun aspect of it while informing about the potential dangers of all the technologies. This is something I've been doing on my side, but I've also incorporated it in my day job working on social technical aspects of AI. For instance, 3 years ago we worked on scriptwriting and playwriting using large language models before Chad GPT was released, and we partnered with playwrights and screenwriters to explore the potentials of the tools and its limitations. or we have also been talking to comedians and to artists about all the possible uses of AI that empower the artists instead of replacing them, and that's all that I have to say, but I believe that Andrew has a few more questions. So welcome, welcome back, Andrew. OK. All right, so all of this is fantastic. I just want to say, uh, I'm, I'm a drummer, OK, so, uh, you know, we, we start with the fundamentals of jazz when you, when you learn how to play drums and so improvisation is a core component of that, and I love that. Um, I wanna ask you, so how much of AI is art versus science? And I'm thinking more about your day job than I am about this. How much of AI is art instead of science? I think there's a lot of An artistic approach to AI that is very useful in understanding the um affordances. Um, I've been very lucky to, to meet many artists working with AI in 2016. who have been exploring the glitch aesthetic and everything that doesn't work with AI to actually make work of art out of that and and they literally build upon the work on explaining AI, explaining convolutional networks. So there's a very interesting partnership that happens that kind of replicates what poets were doing with drugs in the 19th century. Am I making a comparison? Sort of, yes. Um, you have done a lot of different work in, in building your career, your day job, um, in, in different areas, navigation you've worked on, you've worked on, um, climate modeling. So what have you learned from that that you're putting in this work? Yes, um, directly climate models, there is the stochastic aspect which is vital to climate models. That's essentially how we get forecasts of the potential outcomes. You change initial conditions and you're keeping the same dynamical model, you get radically different outcomes. And so when we look at both extremely scary curves of the rise of temperature over the last 8 years, it might rise by only 1.5 degrees or by as much as 80 degrees. And this, uh, this is an illustration of a stochastic aspect of AI model. You my. With some crackling from microphone, um, that, um, I am trying to convey when coming on stage and in improv this is the same principle that we listen to minute details in somebody's conversation in. Happens on stage. What happens in the audience, and we get influenced by that and we use it in our creative practice to get inspired and to radically change the outcome of a scene. So huge parallels here. Fantastic. Well, we've only got 3 minutes left, so why don't we actually try this thing? What do you think, folks? Yes, let's improv. All right, so what I have here is a little bit of a system that will help Andrew improvise. So Andrew, have you done theater or improv? What's that? Have you done improv and theater? I have done theater in high school, but it's been a long time. Yes, have you been terrified by having to find to remember your lines? Oh, who, who isn't? Who isn't? Whose line is it anyway? Yes, yes. Well, what if I tell them what I'm seeing? Yes, what you're seeing right now on this, on these augmented related glasses is light generated by AI. And from now on, Andrew, if you can hold the phone, of course, you can only, and you can only say AI generated lines. So let's see how this is going and if. All right, so I am typing a prompt, activating the system. Don't look fashionable. All right, rebooting the system. This is a live demo. Yeah. It's coming up, um. Yes, it is coming up in those very long moments of silence on stage. So what I see are a bunch of different options in my uh in my glasses. Um, it's, it had generated um different responses and I can choose which which to deliver to in our conversation. All right. So if I say something, it's saying hello, yes. Hi, AI. Nice to be here. Well, Hello, hello, Andrew. From now on you are only controlled by AI. You can only say lines that you see in front of you. We are here at the convention center and uh we, let's imagine that we are in, um, at a bar. Do you want some drink? Can I help you? Sounds ambitious. All right. I knew you would think that, Andrew. Well, here's your Negroni. Thank you. Right, Andrew, we've been good friends. We've been living in New York, um, 15 years ago and enjoying the city. Is there something that you really remember and that inspired you when you were in New York? Oh, the rats, the rats, of course. Well, and that is the end of the show. Thank you very much. Thank you, Andrew, of course. All right. Let me pull this down and get out of the stage. You've been fantastic. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.

 That being a capital your new company, you're doing something different than what the other sees in the market are doing. Tell us a little about that. Sure. So my primary focus has always been really working with entrepreneurs who are trying to help improve usability and accessibility of cryptocurrencies. I think one of the things that I think about a lot is 60% of wealth in America is controlled by women. And in the US in particular, women drive 80% of household spending. Now, if you look at the cryptocurrency ecosystem, we don't really do a great job communicating the value proposition or the use of these assets. And I feel like we're missing out on this major opportunity to market to 51% of the population to 60% of the wealth into 80% of consumer spending. So my question was, can we invest in companies and can I help them figure out different ways to approach growth that isn't so heavily engineering and tech-focused? I feel like the narrative when we talk about Bitcoin or Blockchain. Inevitably goes into this tech rant. But can we talk about you x? Can we talk about product? And can we talk about education and advocacy to really help people understand and use these tokens for something beyond just financial speculation? You recently featured in a glamor magazine feature about women in Cryptocurrency and Blackchain. It was a fantastic article and great spread. Tell me a little bit about your experience being a woman in Blackchain. Sure. So my response to that is tell me about your experience being a man-- That's totally fair and unwanted. Look. I don't think gender has anything to do with the experience you have. I do think one of the things that really drew me to the cryptocurrency ecosystem early on in 2012 to 2013 when I started getting involved in Bitcoin was the fact that it was a true intellectual meritocracy. Now, I do think one of the things that I've like to do over the last few years is use my platform to just feature some of the women in this industry a bit more. I think media tends to look just at the founder CEO of a company who in the crypto ecosystem for the last few years has trended predominately male. But I think there are a lot of really fantastic female operators, female entrepreneurs, female engineers who are building these companies alongside their male counterparts. And so I write this blog called the Leader Series where I like to feature the stories of these women. And then I think with the glamor article, one of the things I really wanted to talk about is just the balance of power in our world. I think for better or for worse today power and wealth are still very closely aligned. And crypto assets have created a lot of new wealth I myself am fortunate to participate in that along with pretty much anyone who invested before 2017. And I think the question is, can we use our influence? Can we work together as an industry to start to break down some of these power structures to make our world a bit more egalitarian? But also to ensure, again, that 50% of the world's population isn't missing out on this massive wealth creation event. The statistics is showing very few women investing in bitcoin. Do we really know, I mean, this is a pseudonymous currency we don't know who's behind these. So do you think the statistics of women investing in bitcoin, et cetera, or actually higher than they're made out to be or? Absolutely. So I think people always like to look at this Google Analytics survey. Someone published. Someone looked at Google Analytics and said 95% of searches on the word bitcoin are done by men and 5% are done by women. And I that statistic number one is completely inaccurate. I also think that generally the men in the industry tend to be a bit more outspoken about their investing behavior. I know a lot of women who participated in cryptocurrencies early on who built a considerable amount of wealth who have been active. They just don't vocalize that as much and they don't speak about it. And so I do think there is more balance. It's probably more 80-20. That probably mirrors general tech more closely. Still, I think we can do a lot better. I don't know if we can get to 50-50 in the next year or two years or five years because I think there are deep-rooted systemic problems that lead to some of the gender imbalance we see, especially at leadership levels. And I think that will take time and a lot more than just our egos working on it to figure out. But I do think that there are opportunities to change the ratio a bit. So can we go from 80-20 to something more like 60-40? I would be pretty happy with that. I think that would set a good tone. And I do think there is an opportunity here to stand out from the rest of the venture ecosystem from the rest of the tech ecosystem. And say, hey, cryptocurrency is a place where all people are welcome. Regardless of your affiliation your background, your experience level. We actually do have a lot of people who have no formal education who are leaders in the crypto ecosystem, which is another I think pervasive systemic bias that you don't see in other types of tech investing. And so I think there's just an amazing opportunity here to enable all people to participate in this, not just wealth creation, but this new technology, this new movement that we're creating together. 

How to Make Sure Women Don’t Miss Out on the Crypto-Boom

Finance

Few women invest in Bitcoin, reportedly. 

According to Athena Capital’s Meltem Demirors.


[MUSIC PLAYING] All right, so let's kick things off by talking about venture capital. You've been known to go around the venture capital circuit, the conference circuit, wearing a sweatshirt that says venture capital is dead. Yes. Is it dead? Has cryptocurrency killed venture capital? Look, I don't know the answer to that question definitively. I think cryptocurrencies, tokenization, ICOs, have introduced a new dynamic into early stage capital formation and venture firms are definitely taking notice. I also think there is a rising tide of companies who are looking at the venture ecosystem, who are looking at the power dynamic between investors and entrepreneurs, and who are asking themselves is this really the right way for me to capitalize my company, or are there other ways to do it that reduce some of the potential conflicts of interest. And so the shirt really is intended to be a bit incendiary, if you will. I've been known to be a little bit of a troll from time to time. But I think it gets people thinking. It gets people asking questions, and so it kind of helps spice things up. Sure. We just saw this week, there's reports at Andreessen Horowitz, the renowned venture capital firm, is launching a crypto-focused fund, which would be a big deal. Andreessen's since actually been investing in crypto assets since 2013. They were investing early on in companies like Coinbase, many, many others, and so they've built a considerable equity portfolio in the crypto asset and blockchain space. What they haven't been able to do, because of their current LPA, or their LP agreement, the way they raise capital from their investors, is invest directly into cryptocurrencies using investor funds that are dedicated to the main fund. So I think part of the motivation is creating a new fund with a new LPA that gives them more flexibility to invest in cryptocurrencies. Some of the established venture capital firms are running into some obstacles. Like we've seen Sequoia is now engaged in a lawsuit with Binance, the biggest crypto exchange out there. They said they were going to invest at a certain price in this company, but then all of a sudden all of the crypto coins started going bonkers. And now that company wants to get a better deal somewhere else. So it seems like there is some kind of mismatch between the traditional thinking in venture capital and what's going on with all of these cryptocurrency-focused companies. Well, I think the primary driver there is the power dynamic between entrepreneurs and investors. I think over the last decade in America, the venture community has engaged in something that I like to call the Thought Leadership Olympics. It's really fascinating. You know you see VCs sitting on stages, talking about all of these different themes and trends, but really it's the entrepreneurs who are doing a lot of the hard work. A venture capitalist is an allocator of capital. If you're allocating someone's capital and focused on maximizing the return on that capital, you're going to behave in some ways that may not necessarily be in the best interest of the companies you invest in. And I think the Sequoia lawsuit is one that, to be very frank, just kind of makes me laugh. It's like they're stomping on the table going, hey, we wanted to invest. Let us invest. So I don't know what they thought the outcome would be. But if I was a company raising money, I might think twice before taking a check from Sequoia or signing any sort of legal document. [MUSIC PLAYING] 

Are Cryptocurrencies Killing Venture Capital?

Entrepreneurs may not want the influence of investors. 

Athena Capital’s Meltem Demirors explains.


 I was at a hedge fund conference a few days ago where an investor John Feffer is saying that Bitcoin the price of bitcoin, which was it 20,000 back in December. It's now about 9,000 so more than halfway down. Now, he's saying it could hit 700,000 a VC Tim Draper. Put at $250,000 price target. And he's saying that could happen by 2022. What's your view on this? Are we still in a bear market? What are these bullish predictions? Where do you think we're going? Look. I think it's more about, if you actually believe in bitcoin, they're going to be upstair, they're going to be downs. I don't know what price that's going to be in 2020. All I know is that we've moved from if it will happen to when it will happen. And in my view, there are going to be certain systemic events in our world that are going to accelerate the adoption of Bitcoin. But there are also things that we can do as an ecosystem to increase the adoption of Bitcoin by making it more usable, more accessible, but also communicating about it in a way that's understandable to most people. I think most people still feel when someone talks about bitcoin, are they speaking English? Is that foreign language? And so I think we are shifting from just early adopters and tech savvy people investing to now a broader audience investing. So I do think that there is this increased level of interest. And now the question is just, how do we make it safer for consumers? How do we make it more accessible? And how do you resolve some of those frictions that make it so hard for your average person to just conceptually grasp why Bitcoin matters? And I think once you get to that point, the price will go to a point that is greater than where it's at today. So you're still bullish? I'm very bullish and a mega ball. 

Is the Best of Bitcoin Yet to Come?

Bitcoin will thrive with increased awareness. 

Bitcoin Could Keep Rising

Athena Capital’s Meltem Demirors gives her take.


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