“For first you write a sentence,
And then you chop it small;
Then mix the bits, and sort them out
Just as they chance to fall.”
— From Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur by Lewis Carroll, 1883
On July 2nd, 2024, in the Aldridge Theatre, a cast of nearly 30 Frensham Heights students performed a first for the school - a script co-written with AI.
The intention from the start was to ‘show their working’ so that the audience could plainly see what the AI was capable of and where it fell short. However, they did not intend to indirectly innovate a surrealist writing technique known as the cut-up method.
In his 1961 article “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin,” William Burroughs explains the process:
“The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4… Now rearrange the sections, placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different.”
David Bowie used this technique in his lyric writing. In the ‘90s he co-developed a piece of software, called the Verbasizer, enabling him to input text and output it in a random, and – at best – inspired, order.
The Frensham Heights students further innovated the cut-up method by using AI as an advanced form. At first, students inputted story ideas which the AI chewed up and reassembled into a script - Draft 1. As collaborators, it was their job to read the script, pick the bits they liked, remove what they didn’t, and feed this back to the AI.
The students followed this process several times (through Drafts 2 and 3) until the AI produced the final draft - an amalgamation of all their feedback in one cohesive narrative.
In the final performance, they performed extracts from each draft, including the speaking of stage direction. They also presented the audience with the chat history, showing how the AI had responded to their commands in conversation.
By the end of the process, the students felt that the script belonged more to them than to the AI, because they didn’t simply ask the AI to write a play. Instead, they used the AI as an enabling tool, like the cut-up method used for over a century. The real advantage of AI in this process was not that it could write a superior play, but that it could generate options with inexhaustible capacity and speed.
The AI alone could not have produced a play that reflected the cast’s collective identity. However, it saved time (and with the creation of voiceover, video and artwork—time and money), producing in seconds what could otherwise have taken hours.
The final result was a piece of theatre that was innovative for everyone involved. The creative input of every individual student was evident in the final piece, and because of this, each student performed with confidence and exceptional skill, feeling ownership over the words they were speaking. The conclusion of this experiment was that AI is best used as a tool, producing new perspectives and giving options to explore rather than directions to follow unchecked.
Written by Adam Jennings, director and Frensham Heights LAMDA teacher
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