Opera Makers Are Already Collaborating With AI. It Won't Decimate the Arts.
Artists and creatives fear AI will destroy their work. The language used by arts commentators is often apocalyptic: AI will decimate the arts, it is evil, it is the devil. But the reality, examined through opera, is more complex.
Opera synthesises multiple art forms - music, visual arts, architecture, poetry, dance, theatre and film. It's a particularly useful lens for understanding how technology and creativity interact, because opera has always embraced new inventions while preserving historic crafts.
From its emergence around 1600, opera makers adopted the latest technologies: pyrotechnics, automata, flying machinery, trapdoors, electric lighting, film, and digital media. At the same time, opera conserves scenic painting, embroidery, period instrument restoration, and forgotten repertoires. It is an art form that looks simultaneously backwards and forwards.
What AI Actually Does in Opera
The most frequently asked question about AI is whether it will replace people. Concerns centre on ownership, consent, and the use of performers' likenesses. These concerns are legitimate. Yet in opera, it remains surprisingly difficult to identify artistic roles that might be replaced by AI.
Generative AI - creating images, words, and music - captures headlines but is, in many ways, the least interesting application. Generative art has existed in opera for decades through researchers and musicians, with little impact on how new work is created more broadly.
The more interesting questions concern collaboration and entirely new forms of artistic practice. Photography transformed how painters looked at the world. The pianola works of Conlon Nancarrow influenced composers including György Ligeti and Gérard Grisey. New technologies alter the conditions in which artists think and create.
Practical Applications Beyond Headline-Grabbing Generative AI
Many useful applications of AI in opera are operational rather than artistic. Machine learning systems manage workforce planning, scheduling, booking, and operational data analysis. Within production, AI analyses scenery loading and improves safety applications. These applications rarely make headlines but may have greater long-term impact.
AI also reduces waste. AI for creatives includes pre-visualisation tools that cut creative experimentation in set-building and costume making. AI tools can place costume drawings on three-dimensional bodies and allow designers to examine them from every angle. VR-driven set visualisation is becoming increasingly sophisticated.
The Ethical Questions Remain
Does it matter if singers' voices, writers' words, or artists' work are appropriated and misused? Yes. If there is direct profit from appropriation, legislation, controls, and protections are essential.
At the same time, creativity itself has always depended on access to culture, knowledge, and previous work. The ethical, environmental, and social implications of machine learning raise questions every institution must address - just as representation, access, and international touring do.
AI appears to have emerged suddenly, but it is part of a continual expansion of technology unfolding over centuries. It is a space in which differing artistic and imaginative voices are essential.
Rather than decimating the arts, AI may lead us to value them more highly, to protect and preserve them. In the opera house, stratospheric singing, virtuoso instrumental playing, stunning scenery, bold theatrical invention, and the communal energy of a live audience are not things challenged by AI.
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