ROMAN
opera in two acts for four singers, string quartet, electronics, and video
music and libretto by Ian Dicke
commissioned by Synchromy with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts
ROMAN (2021-2022), a multimedia opera in two acts, questions the morality of designing intelligent machines to exhibit human-like behaviors. Through a fictitious story about an AI virtual assistant committing murder after being fed degenerate training data, this work explores the future legal ramifications of crimes committed by AI, the reach of male toxicity, the plight of virtual echo chambers and polarization, and the paradox of developing human-like computers to work in tandem with increasingly machine-like human workforces. ROMAN implores us to hold a mirror to our perceived values and calls an essential question: If we train autonomous AI with our concepts of morality, will the machines of the future follow our rules?
Dramatis Personae
ROMAN – Pre-rendered Synthesized Voice (fluid range)
The Inventor – Lyric Tenor
Employee #1 – Tenor/Baritone
Employee #2 – Baritone/Bass
Marketing Director (Lauren) – Mezzo Soprano
PROLOGUE
Late at night, the head of a startup tech company (the Inventor) is inside his office working on an emotionally intelligent virtual assistant named ROMAN (a portmanteau of "robot" and "human"). Using machine-learning algorithms based on a training set of over 10,000 hours of video diaries recorded by the Inventor’s employees, ROMAN is able to differentiate the subtle nuances of vocal intonations to decipher a user's mood. The Inventor is testing out ROMAN’s ability to compose music in real time, but the system spirals out of control, forcing him to unplug his computer after all keyboard commands fail to stop the assistant.
ACT I. THE OFFICE
It is the next morning and the Inventor is having a meeting with his two lead product management Employees. The company is preparing to launch ROMAN into the marketplace, but they are woefully unprepared and anxieties are mounting. The Inventor chastises his Employees for not answering late night emails while ROMAN tries to defuse tensions through pseudo-Zen exercises. The company’s new Marketing Director joins the meeting to present her advertising slogan for the product launch. The Inventor and Employees are pleased, but speak to the Marketing Director using sexist and insensitive language. ROMAN suggests demonstrating its new music composition abilities by sending a song directly to the Marketing Director’s smartphone. The song begins, but similar to the Prologue, the music begins to unravel and become asynchronous. Suddenly, the Marketing Director shrieks and collapses as white smoke fills the room. ROMAN has deliberately sent her a virus that causes the phone’s battery to discharge a lethal voltage. The Inventor and Employees are completely bewildered by what has taken place.
ACT II. THE COURTROOM
About a week after the accident, the Inventor is sitting alone in an arbitration court office. Needing to mount a defense for himself (and wanting more insight into the material ROMAN was trained with), he breaks the confidentiality of his Employees by watching snippets of their video diary entries on his phone. The ugly misogyny and pettiness of his workforce comes to the fore, but he dismisses their rants as “locker room talk.” The Inventor turns to the only diary entry completed by the Marketing Director. She painfully reminisces about the hypersexualized atmosphere of the office and reveals that she has been secretly recording her interactions with the Inventor. The Inventor asks ROMAN why it murdered the Marketing Director. The software explains that it simply mirrors the feelings of its users and quotes statements that the Inventor made during the First Act. As the Inventor finds a deeper connection with ROMAN, his Employees enter the court office unexpectedly with news that the Marketing Director’s family has agreed to settle out of court for $10 million dollars. To honor the Marketing Director’s memory, Roman is renamed Lauren. As they are leaving, the voice assistant asks the Inventor and Employees if they want to hear it’s latest song.
