Good Cop Bad Cop: Mewn Sgwrs/In Conversation
Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff
Sat 9 Mar
words: MAB JONES
For many of us, ‘robots’ have always been seen as half-human things. Gone are the days of Asimov’s robot-related tales and the clinking, whirring, LED-flashing ‘bot of telly show Lost In Space. Robots for my generation were Number 5 from Short Circuit, who somehow managed to possess human feelings (via miracle-making cinematic device ‘the thunder bolt’), and Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, who was almost the opposite of that: ‘human’ on the outside, and all wires ‘n’ whatnot beneath.
Cleverbot is a formless ‘bot, but a ‘bot nonetheless. It began as a piece of software that would transform text to speech on a computer, in a variety of voices, which good cop bad cop (Richard Huw Morgan and John Rowley – not sure which one’s which though as they both seem very nice) basically began mucking about with. They got the software reading lists and other bits of text, before moving on to plays, which of course we automatically assume are made for human voices. Soon they were “creating a whole cast of characters, manipulating the software… finding ways to make it ‘feel’/’sound’ more human…” This was then further developed as part of National Theatre Wales’ WalesLab, and so Cleverbot was ‘born’.
Acting as the voices of the ‘bot were gcbc, one the questioner, and one giving Cleverbot’s sometimes clever, sometimes obtuse, answers. As I walked into the event (which lasted six hours, viewers being given tickets which allowed them to enter/leave at will), the questioner was just typing/speaking a sentence of wild poeticism: “The puddles are growing into whole lakes of tears and I am drowning in them”; to which the Cleverbot replied: “I think you’re talking to too many people at once”. Amusing, bemusing, and a little bit Data-like, these sorts of responses came at intervals, as if, in comedy terms, the questioner was ‘the madcap guy’ and Cleverbot ‘the straight’. At other times, I needed to remind myself of who was the Cleverbot, the ‘bot and the human both seeming so similar, the style so much like small-talk, that it powerfully brought home to me the fact that many of our interactions are, indeed, terribly robotic.
Philosophical conundrums, such as “what is life” and “what is love”, too, were explored, and the ‘answer’ in these cases were that neither human or ‘bot had a clue. These lofty topics often flew swiftly into the realm of the hilarious, while the questioner’s (Richard at that point) sudden use of the Welsh language provided yet more laughs, as Cleverbot attempted to answer a query it clearly did not understand. “Wyt t’in siarad Cymraeg?” The answer? “9pm”.
Satirical yet serious, the show raised some interesting questions about what it is to be human/robot, and offered a glimpse of a future in which, Blade Runner-style, it might be impossible to tell the two ‘species’ apart… But, eating bananas as they read, so far the chimps are clearly more clever than their creation, and the banal brilliance of Cleverbot a monkey-made, mischievous, madcap robo-routine that this viewer found very enjoyable indeed.
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