The Wall Street Journal’s article on the 9th February, 2026 reports on the bleach-blonde Scottish philosopher Amanda Askell responsible for giving the chatbot, Claude, a sense of right and wrong. She reveals on her website that
I’m a philosopher working on fine tuning and AI alignment at Anthropic. My team trains models to be more honest and to have good character traits, and works on developing new fine tuning techniques so that our interventions can scale to more capable models. Before this I worked as a research scientist on the policy team at OpenAI, where I worked on AI safety via debate and human baselines for AI performance.
Her role in ‘fine tuning’ should in no way be underestimated. A bibliography of her extensive research can be viewed on her website at https://askell.io/publications/ or closer to home, the forty-nine papers she has co-written with the Anthropic team you can read through your State library.1
For a long time, I buried my enthusiastic views on the appropriateness that it was right and proper for philosophers participating in the ‘training’ of Large Language Models, turning algorithms into ‘thinking machines’. The mechanics of simulating a human response from the LLM as a result of a ‘prompt’ fitted within a vast array of concepts I had been afforded from my teacher training as a English drama teacher and my research of theatre history to doctorate level. In a nutshell, it knocked about in my thoughts the wild and wonderful relationships that existed between thoughts, language, actions and how these come together to represent ideas, emotions and much more.
That classical example
Aristotle’s Poetics has been considered for centuries as the beginnings, at least in Western Thought, of an explanation of how language (poetry) can simulate dramatic action (specifically poetic drama). Based on this view, Aristotle explains how simulating actions is made to seem real by ‘copying’ elements of time and place.
Tragedy, then is a process of imitating an action which has serious implications, is complete, and possesses magnitude... A poetic imitation, then, ought to be unified in the same way as a single imitation in any other mimetic field, by having a single object: since the plot is an imitation of an action, the latter ought to be both unified and complete, and the component events ought to be so firmly compacted that if any one of them is shifted to another place, or removed, the whole is loosened up and dislocated; for an element whose addition or subtraction makes no perceptible extra difference is not really a part of the whole.
So, what we have in motion is the linking of simulation with imitation. In time, this gives rise to the Elizabethan concept of the theatrical metaphor of the stage as a ‘mirror’ of the world, not the least the many allusions to the metaphor in all Shakespearean plays, signalled physically by the name of Shakespeare theatre as ‘The Globe’. Now, [hrases like “All the world’s a stage” have entered our common English way of speaking.
The world, the stage and AI
As the most life-like art form we have as humans, drama has been part of human cultures since the earliest times of human history. The fact that drama is now produced overwhelming as mediated ‘streaming’ products rather than the live performances in the past. Nonetheless, as a theatre historian I know how the development of performance culture was NEVER far from technological developments and innovations. Simultaneously,
Beginning a story of social importance
Studies of the human mind have fascinated many scientists, theologians, philosophers, and artists. Yet, it is was seen to be a secondary concern to link the work of theatre practitioners such as Stanislavski, Brecht, Heathcote, and Boal with growing our understanding of human cognition.
It wasn’t until the turn of the 21st century, as Elliot Eisner claims in The Arts and the Creation of Mind, that the arts were seen as making “a distinctive contribution to the development of thinking skills” and giving rise to “distinctive forms of meaning, meaning that only artistically crafted forms can convey “. As a visual artist and art educator, Eisner was a student of Benjamin Bloom at the University of Chicago and participated in Bloom’s far-reaching collection of evidence in the research of taxonomies of thinking.
However, Eisner’s participation in research in psychology was to change entirely in the direct partnerships between neuroscientists, musicologists, and dance and theatre historians. I became interested in the work of theatre historian Professor Bruce McConachie while completing my doctoral research in Australian theatre history in the mid-1990s. From this vantage point, I viewed what became known as the ‘cognitive turn’ in writing cultural histories in Literature, Philosophy and the Performing Arts.
What theatre historians now tell us about the origins of theatre
In Theatre& Mind (2013), McConachie presents playing, acting and spectating within an evolutionary development of the human brain when he describes the relative complexities and capabilities of each of the brain's three parts: the reptilic, the limbic and the neocortex part, each one evolving of time to develop human memory, language and the uniquely human capacity of consciousness.
McConachie emphasises that only human play gives rise to an infinite combination of playful patterns, crucially connected with passing down learnings from one generation to the next.
In short, play helped our ancestors to survive and flourish. Scientists have found that the amount and range of play in higher mammals correlate with their general flexibility when faced with a problem of survival ... Drawing on scientific conclusions from biology, archaeology, and evolutionary psychology, evolutionary literary critic Brian Boyd emphasises the importance of pattern making and perceiving in human evolution ... For Boyd, art is a kind of cognitive play, the set of activities designed to engage human attention through their appeal to our preference for inferentially rich and therefore patterned information (McConachie, 2013, pp 12-13)
Join me in understanding how theatre is crucial for human development.
The human capacity to be empathetic, however, is not enough to turn playful behaviour into dramatic play. Instead, in evolutionary terms, what is required is the development of conceptual integration or conceptual blending, which enables humans to blend the concept of self with the idea of the character to be played. Its key contribution to a species-wide ability is role-play, a subjunctive form of play in which a hypothetical action gives rise to better memory, mimicking and reading the salient features of a situation. McConachie underlines the research that shows how conceptual blending is in the same cognitive class of human ability as grammar, language, understanding of analogies, and the cause-and-effect process.
Improvisation, for instance, using Stanislavski’s ‘magic if’, signals the human “ability to combine different perceptual categorisations related to a scene or an object and to construct a ‘universal’ reflecting the abstraction of some common feature across a variety of precepts, giving rise to seeds of foundational concepts for later enculturation.
Accordingly, ...The great evolutionary change that produced cognitively modern human beings was a matter of evolving an organism that could run off-line cognitive simulations so that evolution did not undertake the tedious process of natural selection every time a choice had to be made [this] allowed our species to elaborate human cultures upon a common biological foundation. (McConachie, 2012, p.20)
In detailing the role of the mind and body in acting as body schema, which employs psycho-physical ways of working with intentional physicality and emotional communication, McConachie details the actor’s conceptual understanding of the body in time and space:
As a reflex action controlled by the subconscious,
In locomotive action, which shows an intentional movement from here to there;
An instrumental action which concerns itself with performing a task and
An expressive action is more conscious of body image, perceptual experience, and emotional/ conceptual understanding of bodies through tension, shape, amplitude, and projection.
Then, seeing the concept of improvisation from a cognitive perspective, McConachie highlights how “imitation might begin in the imagination”. He refers to cognitive studies like that of John Lutterbie’s A General Theory Of Acting to explain how it is through the executive function of the human brain that the actor can create a performance score, the chunking together of concepts that meaningfully makes the portrayal of a complex character on stage.
So, how could this help you live a creative life and/or work in a creative industry?
Remarkably, the rehearsal processes McConachie describes are uncannily similar to the methods outlined in Barbara Oakley’s A Mind For Numbers: How To Excel At Maths & Science - Even If You Flunked Algebra (2014), an undergraduate text for Oakley’s Coursera MOOC “Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects.“
While critics disagree with the need for those working in the Arts to validate themselves ‘scientifically’, my interest as a theatre historian and educator remains in enabling students to live creative lives. Furthermore, I believe I have viewed through theatre history interesting models of successful entrepreneurship that have sustain many artists to sustain their careers over a lifetime. I bring those models to you in accessible courses through which you can practice successful processes and techniques of entrepreneurial creativity.
This is the link I used for the State Library of Victoria: https://find.slv.vic.gov.au/discovery/search?query=any,contains,amanda%20askell&vid=61SLV_INST:SLV&search_scope=CentralIndex&tab=searchProfile