“Terms & Conditions Opera: A Legalese Libretto,” brought to life by Jake Elwes, “started as a satirical and playful work,” the artist says. “The idea of feeding an AI on its own legalese made me laugh.”
Jake Elwes
At first, it sounds like your classic opera — a full-bodied voice infused with gravitas delivers a set of lyrics as a chorus rises and falls, all to an orchestra’s accompaniment. But the words are far too banal to reflect grand opera themes like ambition, betrayal, greed and jealousy.
“We’ve updated our usage policies to be more readable and added service-specific guidance,” the lyrics go. “Customers may sign up to receive notifications of new updates to our usage policies by filling out this form.”
This less-then-scintillating excerpt from OpenAI’s terms of use is sung with operatic flourish as part of artist Jake Elwes’ “Terms & Conditions Opera: A Legalese Libretto.” The work is a playful poke at the ever-evolving AI landscape, where tech companies behind generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude are reinventing intellectual and creative property laws faster than the average user can follow, and artists continue to grapple with what artificial intelligence means for their livelihoods, and for creativity itself.
“For me there is something very operatic about where we are with the uncertainty of whether AI is a good thing for humanity or not, and the legalese reflects that with companies being sued for copyright breaches and people campaigning to pause development,” Elwes, who’s based in London, said in an interview.
Listening to “Terms & Conditions Opera,” you can almost imagine a costumed performer on stage, expanding his chest and punctuating the legal jargon with sweeping arm gestures. No performers were used in the making of this opera, however. Elwes fed customer-facing fine print from OpenAI and AI music generator Suno into Suno’s own tool and emerged with an absurdist AI-generated composition that shifts between classical opera and genres from reggae and hip-hop to barbershop quartet.
The warning “violations can lead to actions against the content of your account,” suddenly becomes more ominous as a driving rock riff.
The offbeat opera serves as a musical finale of “Subject to Change,” an exhibit that opened Friday at London’s Gazelli Art House spotlighting nine artists, including teachers, engineers and hackers, who engage critically with algorithms, datasets and machine learning to examine their biases, limitations and possibilities. As AI continues to iterate at a head-turning rate, “Subject to Change” explores what happens when creators take a slower, more reflective approach to the technology — it’s another example of artists confronting the implications of AI, with AI.
“Artists are uniquely positioned to intervene in AI’s narratives,” Pegah Hoghoughi, a Gazelli Art House representative, said in an interview. “While industry often frames AI in terms of speed, efficiency and profit, artists reveal its hidden biases, amplify overlooked voices and imagine alternative futures.”
Artist Morehshin Allahyari used AI to resurrect the gender fluidity that characterized Persian portraiture from the Qajar dynasty of 1794 to 1925.
Morehshin Allahyari
The rise of artificial intelligence has, of course, provoked conflicting reactions in the creative community. Some artists see it as a novel collaborator that can steer them in surprising and exciting directions. Others, Elwes among them, express concern and anger about their work being used to train AI datasets without recognition, credit or compensation.
“Prompting corporate AI models can feel very limited and troubling, almost as if you’re giving part of your soul to help improve their models,” Elwes says in an artist’s statement for the opera. “Not wanting to give their model anything of myself, I instead fed it on itself, having it absurdly interpret its own governing laws.”
Doing this “felt a bit like a techno activist move of dirtying the data,” Elwes added in the interview, “but also creates something funny and engaging for an audience to watch.”
Humor Meets Serious Critique
Turning AI into an ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a self-devouring cycle of creation and destruction, may be amusing. But “Terms & Conditions Opera: A Legalese Libretto” projects a serious message.
“Under the humor there is a harsh critique underlying the work, that we need to really consider what it is that we’re feeding into these corporate models and in what part of the creative process they get used for,” Elwes said.
Using AI-generated images as a guide, Auriea Harvey reclaimed and reimagined the slave ship as a mutinous vessel ferrying the future generation to safety.
Auriea Harvey
“Subject to Change” remains on display through December 19. Other featured artists include Auriea Harvey, whose multi-part installation Black Ship includes a 3D-printed sculpture that reimagines the slave ship as a mutinous vessel directing future generations to safety, like a mother ferrying precious cargo.
The piece is the artist’s physical interpretation of AI-generated images created with Midjourney, before the tool banned the word “slave” as a prompt, part of a broader attempt to moderate hateful or abusive content. “Black Ship” emerged from the artist “talking with an inhuman system about something inhumane.”
The installation is “part of my exploration to find form for something I could not properly imagine on my own,” Harvey says in an artist’s statement.
‘Technology Is Human, And Thus Natural’
For the image and sound installation Moon-faced, Iranian Kurdish artist Morehshin Allahyari, an assistant professor of digital art at Stanford University, collaborated with artificial intelligence to revive images of gender fluidity that characterized Persian portraiture from the Qajar dynasty of 1794 to 1925. That tradition began to fade as European realistic painting and camera technology overshadowed it.
Then there’s All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, Memo Akten’s psychedelic experimental film about the fetishization and deification of technology, made with his own custom text-to-image software. In it, technology and nature blur into one another, becoming inextricable — digital devices dissolve into swirling water and lush meadows and pine forests. Animals and apps fuse into hybrid creatures.
“Salvation does not lie in submission to technology. Neither is it in a rejection of technology,” Akten, an assistant professor of digital arts at U.C. San Diego, says in an artist’s statement. “There is no either/or, as there is no divide between humanity and technology; technology is human, and thus natural. Rejection of technology is a rejection of humanity. To break out of this false dichotomy, we must adapt a holistic approach — to embrace not only technology, but all of humanity, all of nature — including technology.”
The film, like “Subject to Change” more broadly, underscores the perspective that technology is neither fixed nor destined but contingent on human intention and intervention.
“At the same time,” Hoghoughi said, “it acknowledges our own subjectivity, how we as humans are ourselves changed by our interactions with these systems.”