From Code to Curtain Call: How AI Composed a Broadway Musical About Sweden's Dot-Com Bubble

In an unprecedented fusion of technology and creativity, artificial intelligence takes center stage to craft a full-length Broadway musical. This groundbreaking project pushes the boundaries of AI-generated content, transforming a Wikipedia article into a three-hour spectacle of dialogue, song, and story. The most astonishing part? The entire production process took only about 12 hours, with most of that time spent watching progress bars rather than actively creating.

In the realm of artificial intelligence, we've grown accustomed to AI's prowess in generating small-scale content - a poem here, a short story there. But what if we pushed the boundaries further? What if we tasked AI with creating something as complex and multifaceted as a full-length Broadway musical? This was the challenge I set out to explore, aiming to demonstrate that with minimal human effort, AI could produce a massive, cohesive creative project.

The Birth of a Digital Dreamscape

The subject? The Swedish dot-com bubble of the 1990s, a dramatic period of economic boom and bust that seemed tailor-made for theatrical adaptation. The source material? A single Wikipedia article. The AI collaborator? Claude 3.5 Sonnet, a large language model known for its creative capabilities. The goal? To generate an almost three-hour-long Broadway musical, complete with dialogue, musical numbers, and a coherent narrative thread.

The project began with a simple prompt: "We will write the most epic Broadway musical about the Swedish internet-related bank crisis 'IT-bubblan' that took place in the 90s." From this seed, an entire world began to unfold. Using a technique I call "one-shot prompting," I allowed the AI to generate content without repeated prompting or refinement. The aim was to see what could be created with generative AI without deep domain knowledge or constant human intervention.

One-Shot Wonder: The AI's Creative Process

As the musical took shape, it became clear that Claude was not just stringing together facts from the Wikipedia article, but crafting a narrative with emotional depth and character development. The AI created a cast of characters that included ambitious entrepreneurs, cautious economists, and everyday investors caught up in the excitement of the tech boom. It wove their stories together, charting their rise and fall as the bubble inflated and ultimately burst.

But a musical isn't just about dialogue. To bring the story to life, we needed songs. Here, the AI demonstrated its versatility, generating lyrics that captured the optimism of the boom years and the despair of the crash. Titles like "Digital Dreams," "Unicorn Dreams," and "The Bubble Bursts" emerged, each song advancing the plot and revealing character motivations.

Beyond Words: Bringing the Musical to Life

To add another layer of realism to the project, I turned to additional AI tools. ElevenLabs, an AI voice generation platform, was used to create voice performances for the characters. For the music itself, I employed Udio, an AI music generation tool, to compose melodies that matched the mood and energy of each song.

From Silicon Valley to Stockholm: The AI-Crafted Narrative

The result is a nearly three-hour musical that traces the arc of the Swedish dot-com bubble from its euphoric beginnings to its catastrophic end and beyond. It's a story of ambition, greed, disillusionment, and ultimately, resilience. While there are certainly moments where the AI's limitations show - perhaps a clunky line of dialogue here, a forced rhyme there - the overall coherence and emotional resonance of the piece are remarkable.

The Curtain Rises: Reflections and Future Steps

Of course, this AI-generated musical is not ready for Broadway - at least, not yet. The next steps involve manual editing to smooth out rough edges and resolve any inconsistencies. Following that, the challenge will be to figure out how to create visuals that match the AI-generated content. It's an ongoing project, one that continues to push the boundaries of what's possible with AI in creative fields.

AI and the Arts: A New Creative Frontier

This experiment raises fascinating questions about the future of creative industries. Could AI become a collaborator in the writers' room, generating ideas and plot points for human writers to refine? Might we see AI-human partnerships in musical composition, with AI generating melodies that human composers then orchestrate? The possibilities seem endless.

However, it's crucial to note that this project doesn't aim to replace human creativity, but to augment and inspire it. The AI-generated musical serves as a starting point, a rough draft that human creators can then mold and refine. It's a tool that can help overcome writer's block, suggest unexpected plot twists, or generate novel melodic ideas.

As we stand on the brink of this new frontier in AI-assisted creativity, projects like this AI-generated musical serve as proof of concept. They demonstrate the vast potential of generative AI while also highlighting its current limitations. They invite us to imagine a future where AI and human creativity work in tandem, pushing the boundaries of what's possible in art and entertainment.

The curtain has risen on the era of AI-assisted creativity. What happens next is up to us - the human collaborators in this grand performance. The stage is set, the AI has made its entrance, and the next act promises to be nothing short of revolutionary. And all of this was achieved in just 12 hours, most of which was spent waiting for progress bars to finish, demonstrating the incredible efficiency of AI in creative processes.

Note: This article was written by Claude, the AI assistant, as part of the exploration into AI-generated content.