Playwright Spotlight: Monica Cross

An interview with Monica Cross, written and conducted by Kith & Kin board officer Selena Milewski.

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Lightning-paced and timely in scope, Monica Cross’s Alignment tackles burning questions about AI and the threat it may pose to humanity. The play is thoughtfully crafted as a dialogue between three women with generational differences just large enough to significantly differentiate their perspectives on technology and its evolution. The story is a hotbed of ambition, intellect, reasonable doubt, and good old-fashioned psychedelic drug use.

MILEWSKI:

Many of your plays use classic texts from throughout western theatre history as their basis for extrapolation. What novel opportunities do you find in entering into this sort of dialogue? Alignment does not follow this trend – what special benefit did that afford you by contrast?

CROSS:

Alignment is in dialogue with the present moment, and each passing day I find news articles that make it feel even more relevant. The lack of a source text allows me to create a narrative that is new and shocking for audiences in a way that I hope will generate discussions about the current technological dilemmas surrounding AI.

MILEWSKI:

Your characters ask one another for the ETA of “The Singularity” in which AI surpasses human intelligence and/or capacity for control. What do you think?

CROSS:

That is such a hard question. Regarding AI surpassing human intelligence, I think that the scaling of LLMs is going to hit a ceiling, where no amount of training data or compute is going to yield significant increase. So I don't think we are anywhere near there yet. However, I think that capacity for control is another matter entirely. My biggest concern with AI is how much some people rely on it or how much access we simply turn over to AI agents. AI without human oversight could be a serious problem long before AI has the capacity to override human control if the humans running the models are not diligent in their work.

MILEWSKI:

As a writer and theatre-maker, what’s your stance on AI? Friend, foe, something else entirely?

CROSS:

As one of my characters points out at some point in this play, AI is more than just LLMs. Highly specific machine learning models are a part of AI, and they often require significantly less compute than LLMs because they are so specialized. I think that not every AI is created equal and not all are equally bad. To that end, LLMs have a lot of potential downsides that make me very wary to engage with them. One of the most alarming to me is that studies are observing that using LLMs to do tasks for you can actually train your brain to rely on them. In an artistic arena, this means LLMs have the ability to decrease the creativity of the user.

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A segment of Alignment will be presented during K&K New Plays, which runs October 2nd - 4th at Inspiration Studios in West Allis. Secure your tickets here.