Intermedial and theatrical perspectives of AI: Re-framing the Turing test

Artificial intelligence (AI), the understanding and building of computational agents that act intelligently, is claimed to be a powerful, pervasive medium. Although we interact with it and hear a lot about it, we do not ‘see’ AI but experience its manifestations and/or outcomes, such as chatterbots and virtual assistants. A criterion for deeming an artificial agent as intelligent has been already proposed by Turing in 1950, coined as the ‘Imitation Game’, where a machine takes the place of a man, known as the Turing test. Despite the test being initially conceived as a make-believe game, AI has been enmeshed in major fields of human social activity and co-determines our lives. In this article, AI is compared with the media type of theatre performance, the epitome of make-believe, on the basis of intermediality. Furthermore, the analogies between AI and theatre are discussed and the paradigm of the puppet theatre as well as the medium of the mask prevail in the analysis. Findings are discussed, especially in light of the mind–body split and the alignment problem, and their implications are contemplated, allowing a re-estimation and re-framing of the Turing test in its theatrical and performative dimension.