Post: What Does AI Steal From Us?

As Jacob McNeal, Robert Downey Jr. embodies the dishonesty underpinning a transformative technology. Illustration from Getty Images. Published January 18, 2025

While artificial intelligence continues to take the world by storm, Pulitzer-winning playwright Ayada Akhtar unleashed this tempest on the stage. In McNeal, he casts his title role into a high-tech cauldron fueled by alcoholism, family trauma, and AI deceits.

Jacob McNeal—played by Robert Downey Jr. in his Broadway debut—is bedeviled by booze, a Nobel Prize ambition, a dark family secret, and a self-destructive preoccupation with AI. Like the AI dramas unfolding in classrooms and courtrooms across the country, McNeal shines a shaky light on the increasingly blurred lines between what is created and what is stolen.

The action opens in a doctor’s office, where McNeal’s physician delivers stern warnings about his liver. Cirrhosis be damned, though: The doctor can barely get a word in as the writer is glued to his phone awaiting updates about his quest for Nobel glory. McNeal’s overattachment to his smartphone is a sign of our times. But his ongoing dialogue with Siri about everything from his odds of winning the prize and how AI could write a work in the voice of Jacob McNeal seem like portents for our future.

Through Downey’s witty repartee with Siri depicted at the back of the stage on a sleek, gigantic iPhone, the audience gets a hint of AI’s potential and its perils. McNeal gives us a high-stakes example of the high-tech plagiarism that has plagued educators and thrilled students. (Indeed, some 89 percent of students in a Study.com survey reported using ChatGPT at least for homework assignments.)

Driving the plot is Jacob McNeal’s lack of compunction in casting accounts from the Bible, Oedipus Rex , his late wife’s diary, and other flotsam–verbatim—into an AI gumbo for his latest work that raises the specter that he has shamelessly done the same in pursuit of Nobel glory. Beyond his dubious high-tech sampling, McNeal engaged elsewhere in garden-variety theft. Having ripped off his dead wife’s work, he faces the prospect of his extortionate son outing him for his fraud. Only through a counterthreat […]

What Does AI Steal From Us?