Piotr Mirowski, Director, Improbotics, tells We Love Brighton about his Brighton Fringe show RoboTales.
Please tell us about your show:
RoboTales is an improvised choose-your-own adventure game, played in front of the audience by the talented cast of Improbotics. The twist in RoboTales is that a robot writes and directs the show. The bot uses speech recognition and state-of-the-art AI (we developed the software ourselves!) to analyse the improv scenes and generate silly new choices and strange transitions. The audiences control the story by voting on their phones for their preferred choice (like a modern take on the choose-your-own adventure books), and then the actors take the story forward. It is like ‘Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’, brought to life by AI and the actors’ imagination and improv talent.
Who is your show for?
Our show combines audience interaction, improv and technology. It will inspire film and theatre aficionados, role-playing gamers, LARPers, writers, all storytellers and adventurers alike.
Read more: Brighton Fringe Festival: The Ultimate Guide
Why should people come and see it?
Our show is specifically relevant in these days of unhinged discussions about AI. RoboTales features human actors who inspire themselves and accept offers from artificial intelligence. The AI system was built by Piotr Mirowski, who is both an actor and a research scientist in AI, and the whole improv troupe is designing the various improv games with AI and the dramaturgy of the show.
We use AI to center and empower the human performers. We shift the narrative about AI, away from the automation of mediocrity via derivative slop, away from the capitalist cannibalisation of creative economies, and away from a reductionist face-off between “luddites” and “philistines”. We are bringing AI tools back to their original glitch aesthetic, serving as challenge and inspiration to the human actors and integrating these tools within the artistic process, to synthesise the maker mindset and the improvisational “yes, and” ethos into a new hybrid art form that celebrates human creativity and gives artists agency over AI tools.
Have you performed at the Fringe before?
So many times! It all started with two-prov shows (when the company was still called Human Machine and the other half of the pair, Kory Mathewson, was connecting remotely from Canada!) at Bar Broadway (2017) and at Marlborough Theatre (2018), then Improbotics started performing at The Warren (2019-2021), Rotunda Theatre (2022 and 2023) and now Komedia (2024 and 2025).
What do you love about Brighton Fringe?
Brighton is a unique springboard for hit comedy and improv shows, with simultaneously very demanding and very curious audiences. The festival has been instrumental for the growth of our science comedy troupe. Brighton Fringe is where we designed a show that bridges different audiences, handling some very experimental technology in Fringe conditions while also entertaining festival punters looking for comedy.
What do you love about Brighton?
After eight years of Fringe events, the city has become our second home. Morning jogs along the beach to get in shape for the show, plentiful bakeries and coffee shops to get nourished, diverse and delicious eateries to reconnect as a team, and armies of seagulls to keep our attention sharp: we love Brighton.
Are there any other shows you are excited to see?
The Maydays! Jenny Rowe from the Maydays has immensely helped design the dramaturgy of improvising with machines. The Maydays have curated their expansive list of improv shows at Brighton Fringe 2025, and we would like to highlight Acaprov, CSI and Happily Never After!
RoboTales is on at Komedia on May 3 at 2.30pm and May 4 at 5.30pm.
Tickets: https://www.brightonfringe.org/events/robot-stories/
Venue: Komedia, 44-47 Gardner St, Brighton and Hove, Brighton BN1 1UN
