Research Seminar - Pigeon Fool’s Turing test: The relationship between embodied AI bots and networked and absent humans

Pigeon Fool’s Turing test: The relationship between embodied AI bots and networked and absent humans

Presented by: Dr Abbie Trott

Date: Friday 22 August 2025
Time: 12-1pm
Location: Online via Zoom and in-person at the SCA Writer's Studio (Level 6, Michie Building)

Abstract

Drawing on ongoing discussions about generative AI in performance and the embodiment of human bodies in the datasphere, this paper asks how conceptualising humans as data-bodies might situate AI chatbots as embodied actants in new medial performance. Pigeon Fool (2024), by ‘techno-trouble makers’ Counterpilot, is the ultimate gameshow style Turing test: can the audience tell the difference between the bots and the humans? The gameshow host, LucasBot, is a generative AI chatbot whose text is curated live from a Large Language Model (LLM). Projected into the performance space via HOLOFAN technology, LucasBot sounds and looks uncannily like Lucas Stibbard. Lucas Stibbard is human: he plays himself and is only present to provide context as an enigmatic pre-recorded voice in our headphones. The audience are data-bodies: present as game players, providing stories and text to the LLM. Considering the complicated rise of live new medial performance featuring generative AI, I examine how, in creating a human/ nonhuman assemblage, Counterpilot continues their work to de-centre the human in immersive performance. 

Presenter

Interested in examining how audiences make sense of emerging technology and digital theatre, Abbie Victoria Trott researches postdigital theatre with audiences. Teaching theatre and performance at a tertiary level since 2014, she is an experienced stage and production manager across community theatre, circus, and multimedia performance. Abbie currently teaches theatre, media studies and technical production, and her monograph Young Audiences and Everyday Postdigital Theatre is under contract with Routledge.