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Look at what our ETC Instructors/Faculty/Staff/Guests had to say about Halves Project Presentation.

Feedback on the Presentation

8 responses

I was a little worried at first about leaning on theatricality and humor into the presentation, but kudos for leaning in and committing to the bit throughout, as it paid off. It also did an interesting thing of subtley pointing out how humans can play to a crowd in a way that AI currently does not. Current progress and obstacles were well explained.
Very enthusiastic delivery, love the performance! That’s how halves should be, exciting and a show. Good job explaining the story of your progress, it helps understand how you go there.
The over the top presentation style was actually refreshing. It worked because it was also informative and was a nice window into the project. Good demo showing a prototype that helped them answer questions.
Good presentation. The theatrics worked well in communicating your challenge.
Good energy–I appreciate the team’s commitment to the presentation. Generally strong presentation–good use of novel structure and narrative structure. Glad to hear about the focus of next steps through prioritized questions.
Good direction for exploration.
You learned a great deal from 1/4s and since 1/4s on how to land your presentation and the exploration of AI + Theater = ? Minor point: if you don’t carefully mic yourselves for making the videos and the audio is OK but not great, put the CC text in so the message comes through – a bit of the geese MC dialogue was missed by me (and perhaps others).
Clear on project goals. Like the video demo and back and forth, great energy! Nice audio of your AI characters. Walked us through your setup clearly. Nice conclusion, answered questions well.

Feedback on the Product

6 responses

It is a tough problem to solve, especially with your tool being such a black box. I am curious how much of this can be resolve with the character definitions and prompts (such as can you give stage direciton or rules, like one sentence answers only, or must include a pun). Also curious what might happen if you had AI generate scenes for humans (or puppets) to perform. try to focus on what it might be decent at (like write a parody song about a subject to a particular song, and then have humans perform it?)
Glad you guys emphasized the point of just building something helps a lot. Part of the improv element could be the personality of the goose. just like how people shout a keyword to start an improv scene, you could have people to shout out and then vote on goose personality. you could even have chatgpt generate 3 directions for answering the questions, and have the audience “vote” on which one happens. what if you had robotic geese? what if you had two people (not geese) on a dating show, but they had to follow the AI prompts? kinda like Nina Conti’s comedy shows you guys are limitless, so you should lean into your experience more! you can do anything!
Choosing to explore the absurd nature of AI is an interesting choice that frees the team up to explore a lot of ideas.
Adding humanity to AI might provide opportunities to enhance engagement and empathy
For your plan, are emotions on the emotion slider separate emotions, like anger and sadness? Why these 5 (or whatever number you have)? Are they binary on/off or can I have a bit of anger, moderate amount, and downright yelling anger? Can you map your chosen emotion set back to improv/acting advice on shaping a theatrical character to justify your choice of whatever subset and range choice you implement? You delivered on message that improv is about giving and accepting the offer. I see already AI actors accepting the offer. I am curious about your reflections later on AI actors giving offers back to the human actor which are not scripted into the context frame for the AI. I also like Mark P’s suggestion of experimenting with AI-AI and seeing where that goes.
It is tough to make AI matter in theatre, good job owning that as part of your challenge and process. A good sense of trying to explore this as best you can. Great attitude in your collaborative creative problem-solving.

Look at what our ETC Instructors/Faculty/Staff/Guests had to say about Final Project Presentation.

Feedback on the Presentation

7 responses

A team having fun can be a joy, especially when they lead with Monty Python. Good follow up with good and relevant content. Overall, this presentation was well organized and presented a clear story for the project and communicated their work well.
Loved your entrance. Unique and fun way of presenting. It added fun and entertainment but got all of the information across
Fun start. Clear on goals. Helpful overview of your learnings on prompting and your findings on working with AI. Walked through your ideas clearly (and cleverly). Video and audio helped share how it evolved. Great conclusion, answered questions well.
THANK YOU for making the presentation fun! Really clear narrative flow and insights I like that you continued the metaphor of the cave throughout the presentation
Scripting of your presentation and each team member as an actor was really good. Nice job bridging coconuts from the beginning to the end. 🙂
Delivered playfully in a very human, storytelling way. I liked the callback to the coconut-horse with the ending AI-actor reflection – nicely done!
Surprising, energetic, courageous opening that woke everybody up after a long day of watching presentations. The Monty Python reference may be outdated, but it’s likely familiar to at least half of your audience (the older Faculty & Staff). Might have baffled your peers, though. Early presenters did a good job of explaining complex stuff in clear and simple terms, even though Aiden was going very very fast — maybe because time was short? Overall, the slides with the big important questions (asked rhetorically by the team-as-actors) were VERY effective in making your design choices clear — and demonstrated the power of what an “exploration” Project can be, following where the design research leads you!!! I wonder, though, if people who haven’t seen your performances (including me!) might feel like they want a slightly better sense of what the test performances were actually like. The small clips and examples were great, but sometimes it was tough to understand how the different pieces would come together to create an AI-powered performance. In general, the presentation went very fast, but covered a LOT of stuff and mostly worked.

Feedback on the Product

7 responses

Good exploration of the space. The honest analysis of their findings carry a lot of value.
Great that you embraced what didn’t work as well as sharing what did and why in each case
Great lessons learned and nice spirit of experimentation and exploration (should submit to conferences). Like that you explored embodiment through animatronics. Iterated well throughout the semester. Great points on AI and acting. Your website is a great resource.
You really had a lot of iterations that you tried, from different contexts, models, pipelines, etc. I’m very impressed that, in the limited time you had, you were able to gain insights from all of these setups. Amazing work, and great job documenting and elucidating all that you learned. It does feel like the one thing you missed was actually fine tuning a model itself. Models aren’t necessarily made to be actors, but you could have trained your own on actor data, which may have given you a lot more success. You could always use Eleven labs to give your character a voice.
Nice job with a very difficult and new challenge.
Those reviewing the Design Document can raise these estimates accordingly – I didn’t inspect it.
LOVE this project and everything the team was able to do. They really embraced it! It seems really fun and goofy but also seems like they learned SO MUCH, and were able to explore in concrete terms some very big questions about human-machine interaction and the potential role of AI in entertainment.