We are delighted to welcome back Improbotics for the third consecutive Brighton Fringe! This time, they première a completely new show that should be more… unsettling.
The theatre company pioneered improvisational theatre with technology and AI, 10 years ago and long before AI even was a thing. Nowadays, we are all drowning under AI slop and human mediocrity, and so they decided Improbotics had to add to the chaos.
Check out our interview with them below:
What is the show about?
Artificial Reality is a spoof of a reality TV show where budget cuts have been so severe that contestants are replaced by AI, and where fake celebrities are brought in a desperate attempt to raise viewership. Audiences (who act as the producers of the show) are willfully complicit in the process.
Our show is a high-tech satire of voyeurism and capitalism. While human contestants compete for audience love, they are constantly at risk of being eliminated or replaced by deep-fakes and chatbots. We use state-of-the-art video generation software to create the illusion, and we feed the actors with AI-generated lines via augmented reality glasses.
Where did the idea of your show come from?
Our new show was written in a dedicated writers’ room, by Alex Newson, Jillian Ellis, Kelsey Yuhara, and Kimane Juneau, then workshopped collectively by the entire cast, including Marco Del Valle, Mike Prior, Paul Little, Sapphire MacIntosh and Sarah Davies. All the technology is developed by Piotr Mirowski and Boyd Branch.
Our previous shows, Artificial Intelligence Improvisations, and RoboTales, had been guided by an ideal of science comedy and of public communication about science and AI. We got incredible coverage over the years, from the Financial Times and the BBC to the Royal Institution, and engaged audiences on the nature of humour, creativity and human spontaneity. We received accolades from ethics institutions, because we are a theatre company that works on building bridges between human agency and a considerate use of AI. We even got featured in textbooks on theatre and technology!
Great stuff… This year, we decided it was time to burn all of those bridges.
Why did you write this show?
Many of us are directly or indirectly involved in or impacted by how AI is deployed in our daily lives, and face a trade-off between productivity and cognitive depletion and deskilling.
And I guess some people (definitely not us!) can succumb to the guilty pleasure of watching fellow human beings humiliate themselves on reality TV.
What was your biggest challenge as a theatre maker?
The “science comedy” tightrope. We have to ensure our genuinely cutting-edge tech doesn’t get in the way of the funny. We spent years refining how to bridge the gap between “experimental tech demo” and “riotous comedy show”.
Any teachers, mentors, or peers that deserve a shout-out?
Piotr Mirowski has been workshopping Play-I, a new format and production with Adam Meggido and Ruth Bratt from the Showstoppers and Lee Simpson from Improbable: this has been instrumental in discovering the theatricality of working with tech.
Click here to book your tickets for Improbotics Present: Artificial Reality at Komedia on Mon 25 May 2026.
