Ghostwriting the Stage

This article examines the uncanny impact of artificial intelligence in theatre-making by way of China’s first AI–written play, AI: Offending the audience. Drawing on hauntology, spectrality and Mark Fisher’s account of the ‘eerie,’ the article reconsiders AI not as a neutral tool but as a ghostwriter dwelling in the liminal space between mimicry and autonomous creativity, calling entrenched concepts of intent and authenticity into question. It argues that collaboration with AI takes the form of a reciprocal ‘ghost dance’: humans feed the algorithm data and are, in turn, subjected to a process of spectralization, such that authorship becomes a haunted assemblage. With creative work ceded to machines, we risk becoming the ghostly residue of the very systems we have built – an unsettling prospect that requires a critical rethinking of our human identity at the moment when what we write begins to write back to us.