My AI Twin Review

REVIEW | FEATURE | TANGATA WHENUA / LOCAL

Written by Madeline Bradley (she/her) | @shutupmads | Contributing Writer

Artificial intelligence has been a dice roll of a topic haunting dinner tables for the better part of a decade. In pop culture, it’s often painted as a Transformer-like villain, here to either steal your job or upload your soul into some bleak digital purgatory (thanks for that, Black Mirror). But My AI Twin, recently on at the Basement Theatre, takes a glow-down approach, less villain, more awkward understudy, the kind that can talk in your voice, handle your life admin, while still fumbling the basics. Brown explores something far more familiar: the way this technology has already woven itself into our daily capitalist lives, whether we consented to it or not.

Written and directed by Shirin Brown, the play centres on Xan, a local councillor deep in the grind of a mayoral campaign, worn thin by the endless performance of being everywhere all at once. When a particularly disgruntled voter delivers a steaming opinion piece to her doorstep, she finally caves to her partner’s suggestion: try an AI twin. Not the glossy Hollywood kind, but a digital Xan close enough to pass in an online interview setting, if you can look past the cursed hands.

One of the moments that stuck with me most was the AI twin interview. Xan’s digital double sat there answering questions while the live comment stream gushed about how “authentic” she was. Later, reading those comments and sitting with the guilt of tricking her community, she seemed to realise how ridiculous it was chasing a political career while outsourcing the “talking to people” part to someone or… something else.

Balancing satire with a dose of reality, My AI Twin asks pointed questions about authenticity, the extra scrutiny faced by women in politics, burnout, and whether handing over your online self to an algorithm is really so different from hiring a PR team to do it for you.

Under Brown’s direction, the humour and commentary is clever without feeling too heavy or shameful, letting the ideas land while the audience is still laughing. My AI Twin leaves you mulling over your own moral ideals. Would you hand your voice to a slightly glitchy double just to make your personal life easier, or is that the moment you’ve stopped being the human you were elected to be and started working for the machine?