How to Train Your Robot (To Be Funny): The Hilarious Sci-Fi Show Teaching Kids About AI

From Improbotics, A.L.Ex and the ImproBots: How to Train Your Robot is a hilarious and unpredictable AI-powered family show. With the help of young audience members, A.L.Ex (an Artificial Language Experiment) tries to learn how to be funny—often with bizarre and brilliant results. Expect improvised storytelling, green screen silliness, and sci-fi nonsense in this interactive kids’ comedy experience.

We spoke to Boyd Branch ahead of the show’s run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

For those unfamiliar with A.L.Ex and the ImproBots, how would you describe it in one sentence?

A.L.Ex and the ImproBots follows the madcap creative adventures of a small group of intergalactic scientists turned comedians and their rogue AI as they make realtime movies with audiences live on stage.

What inspired you to blend artificial intelligence with live children’s theatre?

Artificial intelligence has already made its way deeply into the evolving lives of children. We are on a mission to inspire and empower young people to think both critically and creatively  about AI through humour and play. Much of the current entertainment for young people featuring robots and AI is either over-hyped or overly-critical. We think it’s vital to present AI as what it is- a complicated tool that can be used for both good and harm. We want young people to have the tools and knowledge to engage with the best of AI, while resisting and challenging the worst bits.

What’s the weirdest thing A.L.Ex has ever said onstage?

We have a moment in the show where the Improbots try to see what happens if they prompt  A.L.Ex to be ‘snarky’ instead of ‘helpful’ in generating script ideas. In ‘snarky’ mode A.L.Ex can say some very silly things, one of our favorites is when it said it was ‘tired of script writing’  and just wanted to ‘sit in a nice oil bath and play Animal Crossing.’  

How do you explain AI to a young audience—and how much of the tech do they actually see?

This is one of the most important parts of the show. We both explain and directly ‘show’ how AI is not a single entity or object like a robot or chatbot. Instead we focus on showing how it is a system and tool that can show up in many different forms. It has no opinions, and no real agency or understanding, but is has powerful capability for recognising patterns and generating content based on prompts. We show as much of the ‘tech’ on stage as possible. We have a physical robot, a digital avatar robot, and a chatot version of A.L.Ex that appear throughout the show, and we also show how we are prompting it and what is being generated. We even show bits of programming logic, and play games with the audience to demonstrate how AI ‘learns’ from us.

Do you think AI will ever truly ‘get’ comedy?

We don’t put any ‘goal posts’ around what AI will or won’t be able to do, as the tech is evolving so quickly. That being said, the current forms of AI are really outside the scope of ‘getting’ anything in the way that humans do. AI can certainly correctly ‘get’ the context of a situation, and generate funny sounding things, but this is dependent on a lot of human work behind the scenes. A lot of people don’t realise how much the programmer and prompt engineer are doing behind the scenes to get consistently ‘funny’ responses. Another important part of ‘getting’ comedy the way humans do, is that we enjoy it. It’s not just about being able to interject a response that gets people to laugh, it's also the actual experience of laughing, which no current AI system is even engineered to be able to do.

Finally - What’s your favourite moment of audience interaction so far?

We have a game where kids get up on stage and see themselves transported into various random ‘virtual’ locations (like a jungle)  where they must improvise a creative use of  a random prop (such as a toilet  plunger)  to show A.L.Ex what real human creativity looks like. It is pure delight watching the audience instantly turn themselves into monkey swashbucklers, tiny ant pole vaulters, and elephants with ‘an unusual trunk.’ In these moments we see how creativity is not a simple product, it’s an experience that is so much more, and as wonderful as AI can be at generating interesting things to look and even listen to, it is nothing like the human experience of making things together.

A.L.Ex and the ImproBots: How to Train Your Robot is at Nip at Gilded Balloon Patter House, 30 July – 17 Aug, 11.40 (12.40) For tickets, go to https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/a-l-ex-and-the-improbots-how-to-train-your-robot