King's College London

Working with a team of creatives, researchers from King’s College London have created the world’s first podcast musical about Artificial Intelligence using the style of Northern Soul to highlight the risks of using generative AI such as ChatGPT.

Dr Johanna Walker, a Research Associate in the Department of Informatics, has partnered with playwright Lucy Bell and composer James Otto to produce a podcast musical based on research with the public on how they relate to generative AI when using it at work.

A podcast musical tells a story through song but unlike a traditional musical designed for the stage, it is just audio.

In ‘Destination Hallucination’, the central protagonist is a woman who needs to urgently make it to a ‘last chance’ meeting with her lover. But as luck has it, the driver of the taxi she hails is ChatGPT - ‘human-like, not human’. Interspersed with song, her journey takes her through a series of mishaps reflecting how the model operates. ChatGPT tries to take her to the wrong location and complains that her instructions didn’t provide sufficient context.

On asking the fare the taxi driver says it will be ‘Twenty pounds. Or maybe two grand’, reflecting the various options that generative AI offers users.

Mirroring the lack of clarity over “prompts” and sometimes cavernous difference in answers to the same question given by generative AI models like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, the eight-minute performance shines a light on the underlying assumptions governing these technologies to educate the public about the importance of not placing blind trust in AI output.

In an interview explaining the reason behind the work, Dr Walker said “The news has been full of scare stories of AI taking away creative jobs and the fear of layoffs, but rarely about how the arts can help make sense of this technological ‘progress’. Art has the power to conceptualise and make simple our most complex emotions and fears, and how we relate to AI is no exception to that.

“Eventually, we hope to make this into a complete, all-singing, all-dancing performance and bring it to places like the Edinburgh Fringe with even more transcripts from the public displaying a whole range of issues. In an age where AI is becoming increasingly ingrained in our everyday lives, it is vital that the public are armed with the knowledge that will make this technology work for them, not against them.”

‘Destination Hallucination’ is funded by the King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence and is a King’s Culture Sanctuary initiative. The production can be found on SoundCloud.