AI-assisted staging draws boos at the Richard Wagner festival in Germany

BERLIN (AP) — An experiment with artificial intelligence at the annual Richard Wagner festival in the southeastern German town of Bayreuth drew boos from the audience after producing a staging that appeared to leave some spectators confused.Curator Marcus Lobbes and his team were greeted with boos and whistles as they took to the stage at the end of Saturday evening's performance of “Götterdämmerung,” German news agency dpa reported. However, there was warm applause for the singers and musicians, and particularly for conductor Christian Thielemann.Festival organizers said ahead of the performance that it would be the first time AI took part on stage at the event, “not as a character, but as an image-generating force.” They said that singers would be “the fixed point within a visually seething cosmos of light, texture, history, and association, amidst projections that erupt, constantly shift, and merge into one another.”The AI-assisted projections included scenes from previous performan