Using GPT at a theater festival (how I ended up watching a Scottish in-yer-face play Penetrator)

Last week I visited the biggest theater festival in the world, Off Avignon in France with 1500 different shows in the program.

Overwhelmed by choice, I made a little experiment in GPT-based recommendations. The idea was to describe what I like to see in a prompt, and then ask GPT to rate each show given the official description:

prompt ❯ I'm at a theater festival and there are a lot of shows. I'd like to see:

 - elements of improv and audience participation
 - characters in their 30s searching for meaning in life
 - dystopian commentaries on society and technology

I’d like to avoid:

 - mass-appeal comedy
 - shows intended for children or seniors

Based on this, estimate whether I will like the show described below. Respond as a probability from 0% (no chance I will like it) to 100% (certain that I will like it).

""" (description of the show from the official site) """

The catch was that there were 1500 different shows, so I wrote a small crawler to get all the descriptions, and then a small ranker to automate asking GPT for advice. Left it running while I went to see a show, came back for results, and then went to see one of the top options (GPTs top4 out of 1000+) the next day.

It was this Scottish in-yet-face play called Penetrator. Could be a placebo effect, could be random (yeah I have a data sample of one :)) but it was one of the very best plays I saw all week 💫.

(Longer report here, full results here.)