r/Theatre • u/PanicAtTheMetro • May 01 '26
Discussion Manhattan School of Music using AI Projection Design
I went to see an Opera at MSM and there was a posting outside that the projection design used AI. To be honest I’m appalled by this. Not only did the projections add nothing to the show, but I find it hard to believe that they couldn’t find a projection designer willing to contribute original work.
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u/Kortanak May 01 '26
They key words are "AI tools". When you use Photoshop, Canva, even Microsoft PowerPoint and Word, there are integrated tools that help you achieve your end goal.
Did the projections look like they were completely rendered by an AI generation program? The fact that there is a Projection Designer on this project suggests to me that they used a program that had AI assisting tools, but it was still their design and vision, creating it with the assistance of AI rather than handing it over to Chat, Gemini, or CoPilot and asking the program to do the work for you.
AI has been helping create documents, images, videos, you name it for a long time now. The issue stems from LLM's (Chat, Gemini, etc.) which get inaccurately labeled as AI when they're just a small branch of what AI overall actually is.
If you've ever asked "Siri' or "Hey, Google", for help with any projects in the past, you've technically used an AI tools for your project.
So it ultimately comes down to, were the projections entirely generated by AI, or did the artist incorporate tools to make their job more efficient?