When real reviews are hard to come by, does AI have a place in arts marketing?
“… powerful and poignant.”
“… hits home.”
“… deeply moving, brilliantly acted.”
These quotes describe two Toronto theatre shows. Two are from well-respected local media outlets, and one is from what many experts say is a source known for its AIgenerated news.
It’s hard to tell the difference. Even those in theatre marketing are grappling with how to tell those fake reviews apart from real ones.
Theatre criticism has been a precarious position for decades. In Canada, there are only two salaried theatre critics — Joshua Chong from the Toronto Star and J. Kelly Nestruck from the Globe and Mail — while the rest of the country’s theatre coverage is cobbled together by a small network of freelancers and volunteer bloggers.
The disappearance of theatre criticism and critics makes for an uphill battle for theatre marketers: if a critic can’t attend a show to write about it, how will theatre companies sell their work? Review quotes are often crucial to the success of a production — you might have noticed testimonials on theatre billboards and posters around Toronto — but with the disappearance of critics, those quotes have become harder and harder to come by.
Two companies, Soulpepper and Theatre Passe Muraille, recently shared positive review quotes to their respective social media accounts, from reviews tagged with bylines for staffers at a publication called BNN Breaking. The site is an established digital news aggregator based in Hong Kong, and in recent years has been embroiled in controversy for disseminating fake news. One BNN reporter claims to use “AI tools” for the site on her LinkedIn page, and an investigation by San Francisco-based news outlet SFGate said BNN Breaking’s high volume of daily stories “raises questions about whether some of the posts are being written with the assistance of AI.”
A review clip included as a promotional testimony for Soulpepper’s production of “Three Sisters” calls the production “powerful and poignant,” alongside similarly positive review quotes from the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star. Theatre Passe Muraille, meanwhile, shared a positive review clip of Luke Reece’s solo show “As I Must Live It,” saying Reece “steps onto the stage with a narrative that cuts deep into the silence of men’s struggles.”
After locating the two reviews, running them through AI checkers GPTZero, ZeroGPT and Quillbot, and consulting with David Rokeby, director of the BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies and AI at the University of Toronto, the Star has confirmed that these reviews are almost certainly AIgenerated.
In an email to the Star, representatives for Soulpepper said the company “value(s) the history of theatre journalism as well as the hard work and care that reviewers take when giving an honest and informed critique of (their) productions,” adding that the company does not “actively research or scrutinize reviews to see (if they are) AI-generated as it’s not something (the company has) considered.” Following the Star’s request for comment, the company said they will more heavily scrutinize review quotes in future marketing endeavours.
Representatives for Theatre Passe Muraille said the theatre does not “knowingly” use marketing content written by AI, and confirmed that no journalists from BNN Breaking had been invited to review “As I Must Live It.”
“It was only through contact with the Toronto Star that I came to realize the story … was most likely AI-generated,” said Theatre Passe Muraille publicist Suzanne Cheriton. “This is new territory for me (and for my colleagues, I suspect). I am a passionate supporter of arts journalism and journalists and will be alerting all my clients of the suspected issues with (BNN Breaking).”
Meanwhile, Rokeby confirmed that several social media graphics shared by Crow’s Theatre are also AI-generated. Images posted on Instagram for holidays including St. Patrick’s Day and World Theatre Day contain several clues indicating their roots in AI, such as garbled text and logical discrepancies in how the images are composed.
In a statement to the Star, Carrie Sager, director of marketing and communications for Crow’s Theatre, said the theatre used AI in its marketing for “The Master Plan,” a play that in part examines the evolving relationship between humans and technology, last fall.
“We very consciously created the main marketing image and promo video for ‘The Master Plan’ with AI,” said Sager, “and we were very transparent about it. We even put glitches in the promo video.”
In a followup email to the Star, Sager added that Crow’s has a fulltime graphic designer on staff. “We have not used AI on other marketing campaigns and do not have plans to do so in the future,” she said, but didn’t comment on individual social media posts.
How to spot AI-created elements in theatre marketing
“There are big, big giveaways that the Reece review is AI based on how it’s written,” said Rokeby. “The review of ‘As I Must Live It’ has that ‘in conclusion’ part, which is such a ChatGPT, mansplaining response.”
Rokeby says sites like BNN Breaking could actually contribute to a serious problem in the world of AI: by regurgitating AI-created text, these sites weaken the available data set for other AI engines, creating a vicious loop of progressively worse writing to improve services like ChatGPT.
“This AI-generated content is not useful, it’s not good training material,” said Rokeby. “It just reinforces what AI already knows. So there’s been a notable degradation in systems that are trained on new stuff … it’s dumbing down. It’s not providing unique perspectives. It’s not specific about what might make an actual review, and what might be relevant.”
Rokeby believes the onus now falls on marketing professionals to double-check the sources they amplify, in order to ensure the reviews that circulate are written and read by real people.
“No one’s looking closely enough to say, ‘oh, wait a minute, this really isn’t very deep,’ ” he said.
Theatre scholar and critic Don Rubin, who co-founded the Canadian Theatre Review as well as the Canadian Theatre Critics Association, says the use of theatre reviews for marketing purposes is a longestablished tradition — theatre companies will often condense quotes in order to make them sound more positive or fit onto a poster.
“But if there’s no real reviewer named, and the location of this reviewer isn’t named, you have no idea if their writing has anything to do with this production,” he said. “That’s just plainly unethical … AIgenerated review excerpts — that’s going into another world, and a pretty scary one. I would just run from that, and hope that the theatres, including their PR and marketing people, would run from it as well.”
Rokeby, meanwhile, believes there’s also “a labour question” that needs to be considered. “Images like this replace the artists who would have had a job generating images for social media or posters … it’s so easy to make these images, which are sort of a logical result of Instagram culture. There’s an appeal to things being accompanied by an image. But then there’s a hunger for more and more images.”
Rokeby predicts humans will soon get good at spotting AI-generated art in the wild — beyond easier-to-spot tells like phantom limbs — and says we should brace ourselves for more AI-generated art in everyday life.
“I think there’s going to be a point where we’ll all be so tired of seeing these generated images,” he said. “We’re going to get pretty good at recognizing them … it’s going to be very interesting to see how this settles. I hope we end up in a space that doesn’t flatten and diminish the human creativity side of things, with endless feeds of images that only machines are looking at. That would be a sad, strange fate for art.”
How can AI be a positive force in theatre?
While the rise of AI might be troubling to some, a handful of Toronto theatre artists are looking for opportunities to meaningfully weave the technology into the art of live performance.
“(Working with AI) has challenged my assumptions,” said award-winning director Mitchell Cushman, who in recent months has worked with a graphic designer who specializes in AI. “My default place is being more excited about human artists creating things than robots — that’s in my DNA. But I think the intersection between the two offers interesting possibilities, in terms of how an artist might be able to use AI tools to deepen or change something about the practice.
“I’m trying to draw a line somewhere,” he continued, “and I think the line is where AI is being used as a tool, versus when it’s being used to replace something artistic. I’m at the beginning of understanding this, and I find it easier to picture the dystopian versions of AI than the utopian ones. But it seems like AI is here to stay, and it’s only going to get more deeply embedded in everything we do. I’m on the lookout for ways it can be used to increase human artistic capacity as opposed to replace it.”