Play "Doomers" Dramatizes OpenAI Saga, Sparking AI Ethics Debate

Sam Altman's ousting from OpenAI has entered the cultural zeitgeist | TechCrunch

The lights dimmed as five actors took their places around a table on a makeshift stage in a New York City art gallery turned theater for the night. Wine and water flowed through the intimate space as the house -- packed with media -- sat to witness the premiere of "Doomers," Matthew Gasda's latest play that is loosely based on Sam Altman's ousting as CEO of OpenAI in November 2023. The play fictionalizes events that took place after OpenAI's co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever informed Altman he was fired -- a decision the board made over concerns that the CEO was mishandling AI safety and engaging in abusive, toxic behavior. Despite the obvious meticulous research that went into Gasda's depiction of that night, the playwright told TechCrunch his goal wasn't to create a documentary, but rather to use that setting as a microcosm for the greater philosophical questions of AI safety and alignment. Humans have for millennia created myth and lore around humanity's next great inventions and the risks of pursuing them. Like Prometheus stealing fire and Oppenheimer splitting the atom, humanity can't resist the lure of its own inventions. With Gasda's play, the arts are now weighing in on the philosophical debate around rapid technological innovation -- cementing technology and its barons into the zeitgeist. "The humanities, the arts, we can say something about this," Gasda told TechCrunch. "We're maybe toothless financially and toothless technologically, but we're not toothless in the way that we have the right to represent this world as much as anyone else." In Gasda's play, the company is called MindMesh, and the egotistical, childish, spurned CEO is named Seth. The first act occurs in Seth's "war room" as he and those closest to him debate the merits of the board's ousting, what their next steps should be, and whether the CEO is right to doggedly pursue such society-altering technology. The second act takes place in MindMesh's board room and outlines the various fears among its members, including that the newly-ousted Seth might take retribution on those who betrayed him, and that "we're gonna get wiped out by a competitor species." The central tension of the play is one that's playing out on the world stage today - the existential threat of AI versus the existential promise of it. Gasda says he wrote 35 drafts of this play, which he previewed for early audiences back in August. After more trips to San Francisco -- and many Celsius-fueled writing sessions later -- he arrived with the "Doomers" version that's premiering in New York this weekend through February and will be shown in San Francisco in March. Gasda, who is known for writing and directing "Dimes Square" and "Zoomers," told us he wanted to understand character archetypes and the psychology of a group of people that don't necessarily "engage in self-reflection." The result is a cast of 10, half of which are based on real people such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, former chief technologist Mira Murati, and co-founder and president Greg Brockman. Murati served as interim CEO during the executive shakeup. She left the company in September 2024 to start her own company. Other characters are based on Helen Toner and Adam D'Angelo, two former board members who voted to oust Altman; and even Eliezer Yudkowsky, a researcher who has called for OpenAI to be shut down before it ends the world. Gasda said that Seth, the character based on Altman, is perhaps the most true-to-form in his depiction, but he also left room for fictional portrayals of characters those familiar with the Bay area will recognize -- a callous VC who thinks porn is the future of AI, a newly-minted Gen Z millionaire founder, and a know-it-all lawyer from Stanford. "I wanted to extract enough sense of fidelity and sense of realness to make the play challenging and to make the characters effectively real enough that it won't turn off people who actually know what happened or know what a board room at an AI company is like," Gasda said, noting that Altman was sent a copy of the play before it premiered. The questions the cast debate are pertinent: Should AI development be sped up so "we" can win; should its development be slowed down to allow for better safety and alignment; should it be shut down altogether to protect the human race? Through these debates, we see the archetypes of each character fulfilled: If there is a choice between winning and being moral, Seth, the character based on Atlman, chooses to win. He declares loudly that the board fired him "for creating miracles," and argues that alignment would be a "poor use of a sacred resource." It is human, he says, to pursue excellence and adds that MindMesh is the world's "immune system," a benevolent American-made AGI that will protect us when the "bad" AGI goes rogue. "The only thing to do is outcompete and out-engineer," Seth says. Characters based on Mira Murati and Greg Brockman largely back Seth, even as he insults them, arguing for a vision of an AI utopia where technology cures disease and opens up interplanetary space travel. To which the safety ethicist character, Alina, says, "You make it sound like a genie in a bottle." Gasda sprinkles dry humor throughout "Doomers" -- lightening the mood of an otherwise tense subject matter. He also introduces humor by capturing nuances of Silicon Valley culture. Polycules and ketamine were mentioned more than once, and at one point, the characters casually take mushrooms. There are references to Waymo robotaxis, and at one point a character remarks, "I know drinking is low status, but I really need a drink," in reference to the Cali-sober trend overtaking the Bay. The events depicted in this play took place almost 15 months ago, and already the conversation around AI has shifted as the race for domination outpaces questions of safety. Altman ended up immediately returning to power after OpenAI engineers threatened to quit en masse if he wasn't reinstated. A new board that is comfortable with OpenAI shifting into a for-profit structure has since consolidated under the CEO. Sutskever and Jan Leike, the co-lead on OpenAI's now-defunct superalignment team, have defected. Other safety-focused researchers who raised concerns about AI labs have also departed. That hasn't hurt OpenAI. The company is reportedly raising a $40 billion round that would value it at $300 billion, while President Donald Trump promises to protect AI from regulation as a new arms race against China heats up and new competitors, like DeepSeek, enter the ring. In short, AI innovation is speeding up, not slowing down, just as Seth's character wanted. The question everyone awaits the answer for is whether or not this is a good thing. "It's ugly to build God," Alina, the ethicist in the play, says. "Because we're so ugly, and it's based on us."

New play takes on OpenAI drama and AI's existential questions

Revolutionize humanity or destroy it? Playwright Matthew Gasda's characters, inspired by OpenAI and its famous ChatGPT, grapple with existential questions about the direction of artificial intelligence. "Doomers," which opens in New York from Friday and will play in several venues, is inspired by the dramatic firing of Sam Altman in November 2023 from OpenAI, the AI research company he co-founded eight years earlier. Out of the blue, the board of directors sacked the young executive over his lack of transparency and his headstrong desire to push out new products at breakneck speed, even if this meant relegating any safety concerns to the background. After a few days of crisis, marked by intense pressure from the group's shareholders, including Microsoft, Altman was reinstated and almost the entire board was replaced. "My dramatic instincts kicked in" when I first heard about the story, recalled Gasda, an author whose several plays have been noticed on the alternative New York theater scene. "At first I purely thought it was a good story, but then I started to research and meet people in the business, and I understood that there are people who really feel like the fate of the world is in their hands," he said. Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, AI has been a regular presence in contemporary theater, often embodied by some kind of technological creature, human-like robot or otherwise. Last year, "McNeal," starring Oscar-winning actor Robert Downey Jr, was hailed for its questioning of the use of AI in the creative process. But "Doomers" goes further, seizing a crucial, high-profile moment in the recent history of AI to turn it into a reflection on its future and on the collision between money, technology, power and building a perfect world. In the first act, Seth, a character portraying Sam Altman, freshly fired, asserts his vision of AI's inescapable march to several executives, mocking their unease. The second part features board members tormented by the consequences of their decision to dismiss Seth. In both episodes, the play, which will be performed in OpenAI's hometown San Francisco in March, offers no way out, with the characters ultimately not taking a stand on the hard questions. "That's very intentional," said Gasda. "The only resolution... is that there's no rational way of really grappling with the consequences of this. No one breaks through the doors and solves the problem for them." The playwright held several readings with AI professionals to ensure the accuracy of dialogues and situations. He said that his plays often attract the tech community, and expects them to make up a big part of the audience for "Doomers." "I'm trying to speak to both audiences," connoisseurs and laymen alike. "I want people who don't think about it to start thinking about it," said Gasda.