The increasing convergence of artificial intelligence has opened new avenues, including its emerging role in en-hancing creativity. It is reshaping traditional creative practices such as actor improvisation, which often struggles with predictable patterns, limited interaction, and a lack of engaging stimuli. In this paper, we introduce a new concept, Theatrical Language Processing (TLP), and an AI-driven creativity support tool, Scribble.ai, designed to augment actors' creative expression and spon-taneity through interactive practice. We conducted a user study involving tests and interviews with fourteen par-ticipants. Our findings indicate that: (1) Actors expanded their creativity when faced with AI-produced irregular scenarios; (2) The AI's unpredictability heightened their problem-solving skills, specifically in interpreting unfamiliar situations; (3) However, AI often generated exces-sively detailed scripts, which limited interpretive free-dom and hindered subtext exploration. Based on these findings, we discuss the new potential in enhancing creative expressions in film and theater studies through an AI-driven tool.
*“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players.” Jaques said, in As You Like It. Today, computers make digital worlds – stages – providing a space in which people can perform their own scenes.*
Experiences shape us. New stimuli and unfamiliar situations considerably impact our creativity and psyche. Actors train using improvisation exercises to expose themselves to novel stimuli. Improvisation exercises and training involve entering a creative state of mind, allowing actors to “live truthfully under imaginary circumstances”. In this project, we introduce a new concept ‘Theatrical Language Processing’ (TLP), and an AI-driven creativity support tool called ‘Scribble.ai’ for actors as an application of TLP. Scribble.ai is developed in order to augment actors’ creativity and spark spontaneity, which will ultimately help them to come alive on stage. This tool generates improv-purposed scripts for dialogues and monologues, based on TLP. With this tool, actors can practice with custom scripts written by AI and practice improvisation in an interactive manner.
The dialogue generation function consists of three stages:
To break down each stage, there are three required inputs in the ‘Idea Input’ stage - keywords, genre, and randomness. Based on the three inputs, AI will generate a script with a short summary and dialogue, and show the output as a result on the interface. Each input refers to the following.
In the next stage ‘Conversation’, users can input a new line or new prompt in case they want to further develop the story with AI. For example, users can simply type in the textbox “Sora: I want to go home”, or “The girl named ‘Jessica’ comes and try to talk to the people", and the tool will generate the next part of the conversation or story based on the new input. It allows users to interact with the tool on a real-time basis in the form of conversation. In the last stage ‘Scriptzing’, the user can finalize their scripts and reformat them into a screenplay format. Since the target users are actors, this function puts the story in a format that the users will be familiar with, displaying the contextual information provided by the screenplay format. This tool also provides an export functionality where the user inputs and all the generated texts – the summary of the story and the finalized scripts – are written into a .txt file.