“Opera gives voice to Alan Turing with help of artificial intelligence”

The makers of “I AM ALAN TURING,” an experimental opera being produced out of Yale’s Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, used AI in creating the show. A few years ago, composer Matthew Suttor was exploring Alan Turing’s archives at King’s College, Cambridge, when he happened upon a typed draft of a lecture the pioneering computer scientist and World War II codebreaker gave in 1951 foreseeing the rise of artificial intelligence. In the lecture, “Intelligent Machinery, a Heretical Theory,” Turing posits that intellectuals would oppose the advent of artificial intelligence out of fear that machines would replace them. “It is probable though that the intellectuals would be mistaken about this,” Turing writes in a passage that includes his handwritten edits. “There would be plenty to do, trying to understand what the machines were trying to say, i.e., in trying to keep ones (sic) intelligence up to the standard set by the machines…” To Suttor, the passage underscores Turing’s visionary brilliance.