Making Stuff up with AI and Staging Robots as Improvisation Partners — KEYNOTE
Eleonora Lima
Director of Improbotics, Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind and Visiting Researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London (UK)
25 October 2025, 13:00, Sala Cinema UNATC (75-77 Matei Voievod Street)
Making Stuff up with AI and Staging Robots as Improvisation Partners
The term “robot” first appeared in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R., but it took 80 years of technological progress to bring robots into live performances alongside actors. The coexistence of naturalism and artifice, of script and improvisation, allowed theatre companies to explore human-AI relationships, while the impressive developments in language and image models have both opened new creative possibilities for artists and surfaced ethical concerns about the impact of generative AI upon the arts. I will discuss AI as a creativity support tool, focusing on live performance with generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) or image generators. I will illustrate the talk with an example of my theater company, Improbotics, that has used AI for improvised comedy since 2016 and engages with the wider public at Edinburgh Fringe, as well as my research on the socio-technical evaluation of generative AI tools for co-writing screenplays, theatre plays and comedy.
Piotr Mirowski is the Director of Improbotics, a theatre company that pioneered improvisation with artificial intelligence and robots on stage, investigating the intersection of AI and human creativity. Piotr is also an AI researcher, currently Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind and Visiting Researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. He obtained his PhD in computer science at New York University (Outstanding Dissertation award, 2011) supervised by Prof. Yann LeCun. Piotr has worked on robotics, on weather and climate forecasting and now on human–centered AI, leading an interdisciplinary team working on AI and Society.
The keynote is part of the the second edition of the AI in Art Practices and Research international conference, organized by UNATC in Bucharest from 23–26 October 2025. The event explores the impact of AI on artistic creation and research, as well as its broader applications in society, such as accessibility, healthcare and well-being.