FRIDAY, NOV. 17, 2023
VOLUME 109 | ISSUE 9
CAMERON GREAVES/Cardinal Points
ChatGPT works the ‘Night Shift’
Student generates 24-hour play’s script with AI BY ALEKSANDRA SIDOROVA Editor in Chief
SUNY Plattsburgh’s theatre department hosted a 24-Hour Play Festival Oct. 21, which required participants to write and produce an original play in the specified time limit. One of the four plays, “Night Shift,” featured writing generated by the text-based artificial intelligence software ChatGPT. The host of the festival, Associate Professor of Theatre Shawna Mefferd Kelty, declined an interview, as did Kaleb Pecoraro, the student who used ChatGPT. “We needed a solution to involve as many students as possible,” Pecoraro wrote in an email. “24-hour play festivals are great places to experiment and that’s what we did.” At these kinds of festivals, students have to work in groups to produce a play, from writing to directing and acting, within the given time limit based on a prompt. Hours in, one of the four writers dropped out of the festival. Pecoraro explained in his email that with no backup playwright, the organizers asked him to step in as the assistant production manager and generate a script with AI.
“At no time did we hide the fact that this was written by AI,” Pecoraro wrote. Nicholas Alkobi, another group’s writer, said other festival participants were neutral on the decision. “It didn’t really bother us. We just wanted to see how it went,” Alkobi said. Alkobi said “Night Shift” was “surprisingly funny.” “I don’t know if I like it, though,” Alkobi said. Aivarey Sala, a third-year theatre student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has participated in several 24-hour play festivals hosted by their campus’ student-led AMPLIFY Initiative, and has seen students drop out. Sala has acted, directed and written, and said writing was the most difficult task to accomplish in the “time crunch.” “It’s hard,” Sala said. “We’ve had students drop out in the past lastminute, and I can’t even complain. I get it, it’s a lot.” Generative AI has been a point of discussion both on the SUNY Plattsburgh campus and the writing industry as a whole. Hollywood screenwriters were on strike for 148 days this year, partly due to concerns of AI taking their jobs. There are different ideas about what the writing process
should be like. “I’m torn, like everybody else,” said Assistant Professor Lauren Zito, who teaches video production at SUNY Plattsburgh. “I see [AI’s] usefulness, but I also see where it just becomes content and we have no authenticity, and where the end result is way more important than the process. And who knows if the end result is any good?” Typically, Sala said, the writers participating in AMPLIFY’s “plays in a day” festivals gather for a sleepover and collaborate, reviewing each other’s work as they go. Alkobi said he worked on his own script until 2 a.m. after receiving his prompt at 6 p.m. the previous evening. Even then, Alkobi’s work didn’t end there. He worked together with his group’s director and actors up until the performance. “I refuse to use [ChatGPT], personally, because I have a bunch of ideas for different films and shows and books written down, and I want that to come from pure emotion,” Alkobi said. “You can ask for help, obviously, but don’t use it to do your work for you.” Zito said that part of the scriptwriting process is constant reworking, which ChatGPT eliminates. “A really good script starts one way — even under 24 hours — and it gets
evolved and it changes with different points of view and different revisions, and then the actors get it and they treat it a little differently, and it becomes something new. So you have that wonderful evolution,” Zito said. “There is no evolution here, it’s just being sort of spit out.” Although AI can help skip some steps within the writing process, Alkobi said the director and actors still add personal flair to the script when they work with it, which gets reflected in the performance. “Even though it was written by ChatGPT, the actors and the director could have gone in another direction,” Alkobi said. “It’s different from an essay because that’s not the final product. The final product is what you show to everybody, and even then, sometimes, that’s not final, because movies always have director’s cuts and all that.” Zito noted that ChatGPT does not create anything new and instead repurposes work already out in the world. Sala said AI scripts can be funny, but for the reason that they can’t quite replicate what a human can produce. “There’s just something so different and unique about a human’s raw work,” Sala said. SCRIPT > 3
Training for drug overdose response held BY HAYDEN SADLER News Editor
The Alliance for Positive Health in collaboration with SUNY Plattsburgh hosted a free Narcan training session on Nov. 8. Narcan is a drug used to combat opioid overdoses quickly and effectively. Harm Reduction Linkage Co-
ordinator Bianca Snide and Overdose Prevention Coordinator Krista Trombley presented in front of nearly 100 interested learners gathered in the Angell College Center’s Cardinal Lounge. The training comes in the midst of the opioid epidemic the country is currently facing. The 2022 New York
State Opioid Annual Report found a continuing increase in overdoses related to opioids. Opioids can be categorized as synthetic and semisynthetic. Synthetics include methadone, a drug often used to assist people breaking free of opioid abuse; Demerol; and fentanyl, which is nearly 50 times stronger than
ARTS & CULTURE
THIS WEEK IN PHOTOS
BSU Fashion Show page 4
heroin. Semi-synthetic drugs are heroin, Suboxone and the commonly prescribed painkiller hydrocodone. Xylazine has increased in frequency as a sedative laced with synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, but it is not an opioid itself. Opioid overdoses are nearly always deadly when no medical attention is pres-
ent, and they can take up to three hours to show the first of their effects. Narcan, as the drug is commonly known, contains naloxone. Naloxone binds to the same receptors that opioids bind to and also kicks them off of the receptors. NARCAN > 3
SPORTS
OPINION
In My Element
Men’s basketball plays DI UVM
PRSSA highlights political arena
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