🤖💕🌝 (pronounced "NIKA")

Just a few robots trying to emerge from the post-apocalyptic AI-slop—much like how humans once evolved out of their primordial soup—only this time, love and procreation isn't so simple :(

Every line of dialogue you hear tonight was produced in January 2021—long before anyone had uttered the word “ChatGPT”—on an OpenAI playground I had beta access to. The model was amazing... until it face-planted every third line, fell into infinite “Accessing…Accessing…” loops. Perfect, I thought. My plot already involved two deprecated robots trying to date on Jupiter’s Io, so the clumsy syntax felt like method acting.

Then ChatGPT dropped. Overnight, mocking AI prose became a national pastime; citing an AI co-author was cringe. I let the script sit in Google Drive for a couple of years, watching newer models get smoother, funnier, and too articulate. Every time I tried updating the script, it just sounded too polished. What I needed was that pre-ChatGPT “natural-sounding yet unnatural AI slop.”

So the libretto stayed frozen until the current models had a substantial competency distance from what was originally generated. At which point, I finally had to write this piece. In late 2023 I met up with the Splice guys and recorded them as they lovingly embraced every glitch:

• Indigo GPT-714 forgets the name of the love of his life, and the title of his own novel, calling NIKA “Nikita,” which is perhaps close enough to count as a pet name. Sam sticks to the script.

• Adam randomly becomes the narrator halfway through, for one line. Adam is supposed to be Nika, but we didn’t stop him from saying the line anyway.

• Adam (as NIKA) and Indigo GPT-170 (Keith) get stuck in an infinite LLM loop while literally commiserating about getting stuck in loops: “A loop is a loop, and once you’re in it, you’re in it.”

• Lines like “the human dance” and “go to Jupiter” arrive mysteriously pre-quoted. We staged them with full air quotes, just to make them feel extra suspicious, insinuating something unholy was going on between the two robots.

So what you’ll hear tonight is exactly what that sloppy model generated.

• Fast talk corresponds to giant words: As Ingigo GPT-714 speaks faster, the subtitles balloon from full sentences, to words, to fragmented tokens, just like the LLMs must see every day.

• Battery-pull slowdown: Near the end, the tempo slows down à la The Office scene where Michael’s battery falls out: “I was just learning to looooooovvvve…”—only this version happens over a techno kick.

• Emoji origins: These emojis were chosen in 2020. They’ve been waiting longer than the script itself. I had asked the Splice guys for them to seed this entire aesthetic of this work. It was supposed to be one of those COVID pieces!

Maybe this makes me a naive AI-positivist. Maybe it makes me a nostalgic hipster. Maybe it’s an excuse for why it took five years to stage a 13-min broken love story between two robots on a volcanic moon. But if there ever is an apocalypse, I’d honestly hope some LLMs make it through. I think of that abandoned Slack server I stumbled into once, years after everyone had left. The bots were still firing, the reminders still looping. It had a pulse, still clicking on. Maybe that’s what this is too. 

Either way, I hope they carry the torch, and keep dancing to techno.

Piano: Keith Kirchoff (aka GPT-170)

Drums: Adam Vidiksis (aka NIKA)

Trumpet: Sam Wells (aka GPT-714)