Welcome to the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham, where I'm taking in a spot of improv comedy.

Since 2016, Piotr Mirowski and Corey Mathewson have explored improv comedy with a cast of humans and a lovely robot.

But unlike you humans, I can learn from my mistakes.

Yeah, this is Improbotics.

Alex is the artificial language experiment and although the robot is the physical presence on stage, it's the AI chatbot on Piotr's computer that's feeding it its lines.

But you always evade!

I'm not listening.

The project started in 2016 when Piotr and Corey designed a recurrent neural network that they trained on the dialogue from 102,000 films.

It was, at that time, quite a lot of data.

Then they built a chatbot around it, added speech recognition and text-to-speech.

But the biggest innovation was when they replaced the robot with human actors, who would get the lines generated by AI into their ears and deliver them seamlessly.

Actors who are fed lines from the AI are called cyborgs.

They need to perform as naturalistically as possible, justifying the often absurd suggestions from the AI with appropriate timing, physicality and emotional expression.

Essentially, you're improvising with this really rogue element, somebody who can't say yes to you and they can't really take your suggestions on board.

So it's doing an extra level thing in that you're trying so hard to make this robot look good.

We have collaborated with over 70 actors from around the world and have created theatre companies in London, Edmonton, Antwerp and Stockholm.

Our theatre lab has designed participatory AI with a diverse collection of theatre professionals who want to make a good show.

It's impressive that Alex is doing what he's doing but you guys are, I can see that you're working hard to deal with what you're getting back from the robot.

That's what I like about it, I like the challenge of that because it's an extra level of improv where it's like another muscle that you're working and it's so much fun.

In subsequent iterations of the show, we added multilingual translation in order to enable actors to speak in their own languages and be understood or comically misunderstood, thanks to speech recognition errors.

We have engaged diverse audiences about public perception of AI and Boyd Branch developed tele-immersive improvisation across remote geographies.

Over 300 shows and a dozen research papers, our theatre lab has been taking an interdisciplinary approach to exploring human-computer interaction.