Artificial intelligence has learned to "write" plays

Artificial intelligence has learned to "write" plays. MISIS University and the festival “Biennale of theatrical art. Directing Lessons" launched a joint project.

An experimental model of a neural network - the generator of plays "NeuroStanislavsky" was presented in Moscow. The project opens a new era in theatrical art and in the field of neural networks: artificial intelligence has already created music and paintings, but for the first time in Russia it has written a play. The unique tool was created by a team of students from the MISIS University’s ITAM hacking community in collaboration with the 6th Biennale of Theatrical Art using Sber technologies. Now everyone can be in the role of a playwright - the neural network model is available at the link:
https://go.itatmisis.ru/theatre

MISIS University students have taken a progressive approach, in which artificial intelligence does not replace the author, but helps to create and improve the plot, developing the director’s thoughts. The neural network was trained on the works of Russian classics - Ostrovsky, Chekhov, Gorky and others. Young engineers wrote an algorithm that studied dozens of plays and extracted 14,000 dialogues from them. The database created in this way formed the basis of NeuroStanislavsky.

The developers used the public tool RuGPT-3, a transformative model for understanding the Russian language, trained by SberDevices specialists. At all stages of development, the project team was consulted by professional directors and playwrights.

University students further trained the obtained neural network models, selected hyperparameters for them using the power of the ML Space full-cycle machine learning platform, and wrote a special filter. Thanks to the latter, the generated text is more “clean”. Sometimes the neural network makes a mistake - it gives out extra characters, spaces, and so on, and it eliminates this problem.

The project has passed the first experience of introduction into theatrical practice: with the help of artificial intelligence, director Yaroslav Shevaldov wrote a fragment of a play about the founders of the Art Theater, the great reformers of theatrical art K.S. Stanislavsky and V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko. The passage refers to their historic meeting in the Moscow restaurant "Slavyansky Bazaar" in 1897, which forever changed the trajectory of the world theater. The source was Stanislavsky’s famous book "My Life in Art".

According to the received text, the director staged a short performance. The sketch was presented by the artists of the Vedogon Theater as part of the All-Russian Scientific and Practical Conference "Repertory Theater in the Context of the 21st Century" on November 10, 2022 at the Russian State Humanitarian University. The event took place as part of the VI Festival "Biennale of theatrical art"