Flavius AI Play

Flavius is a one-act short play written collaboratively by three humans and an early 2000’s artificial intelligence trained on the corpus of Shakespeare’s plays. It was performed live in March 2008 featuring Jeremy Ashkenas as LORD FLAVIUS, Jenny Filipetti as LADY ANNABELLE, and Donko Jeliazkov as LUCITOR.

Some say I came, saw, and cannot lack of horrors—
then comes the morning bedtime. What angel wakes me
of thy black silk hair; your tributary drops forth to forswear him.
But what tongue of love! I did hide their effect of a private check:
what makes the weaker vessel, as she died singing it.
Peace, fool; he’s indicted falsely.

Lady Annabelle in Flavius

Technical details

Composed by Jenny Filipetti, Jeremy Ashkenas, and Donko Jeliazkov in collaboration with two custom-built Java programs: a playwriting grammar and an n-gram generator using Daniel Howe’s RiTa library.