"It was a circular thing, you know?': Six Australian Performance Writers Discuss Working with AI

Since the early 2020s, the global proliferation of AI platforms has accelerated the rise of ‘human-in-the-loop’ authorship practices, including for writers for performance. Yet are human-AI playwriting experiments a mere gimmick? An unethical misstep? Or a new form of ‘creativity amplification’? In late 2025, I interviewed six Australian performance writers who had experimented with an AI platform in the past two years, in order to gauge their early thoughts on this recent phenomenon. For some, the ethical, political, and authorial ramifications of these tools became too problematic to justify their ongoing use. For others, targeted methods such as role play, semantic searches, and prompt engineering yielded both desired and surprising results, including the potential to subvert the colonial and capitalist logic of AI tools from within. This article outlines how six Australian performance writers have been investigating these possibilities, and how experimenting with AI tools has transformed how they perceive their ongoing creative practice.