It’s not over until…an artist creates an AI opera using OpenAI’s terms as lyrics

Artist Jake Elwes has created “Terms & Conditions Opera: A Legalese Libretto,” an AI-generated satirical opera that transforms OpenAI’s terms of service into operatic performances across multiple musical genres. The absurdist work, featured in London’s “Subject to Change” exhibition, represents a growing movement of artists using AI to critically examine the technology’s impact on creativity and intellectual property rights.

What you should know: Elwes fed OpenAI and Suno’s legal fine print into Suno’s AI music generator, creating an opera that shifts between classical, reggae, hip-hop, and barbershop quartet styles.

• The opera transforms mundane legal language like “We’ve updated our usage policies to be more readable” into dramatic musical performances.
• No human performers were involved—the entire composition is AI-generated, creating what Elwes calls a “techno activist move of dirtying the data.”
• The work serves as the musical finale for the “Subject to Change” exhibit at Gazelli Art House, a London gallery, running through December 19.

Why this matters: The opera highlights the tension between AI companies rapidly evolving intellectual property laws and artists struggling to understand how their work is being used to train AI models without 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.
• The work reflects broader concerns in the creative community about AI training on artistic works without recognition, credit, or compensation.

The broader exhibition: “Subject to Change” features nine artists who take a slower, more reflective approach to examining AI’s biases, limitations, and possibilities.

• Auriea Harvey’s “Black Ship” reimagines slave ships through AI-generated images created before Midjourney, an AI image generator, banned the word “slave” as a prompt.
• Iranian Kurdish artist Morehshin Allahyari, an assistant professor of digital art at Stanford University, collaborated with AI to revive gender-fluid imagery from Persian Qajar dynasty portraiture (1794-1925).
• Memo Akten’s experimental film “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace” explores the blurred boundaries between technology and nature using custom text-to-image software.

What they’re saying: Industry observers see artists as uniquely positioned to challenge AI narratives focused on efficiency and profit.

• “Artists are uniquely positioned to intervene in AI’s narratives,” said Pegah Hoghoughi, a visual artist and Gazelli Art House representative. “While industry often frames AI in terms of speed, efficiency and profit, artists reveal its hidden biases, amplify overlooked voices and imagine alternative futures.”
• “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,” Elwes explained.

The big picture: The exhibition underscores that technology is neither fixed nor destined but contingent on human intention and intervention, challenging the false dichotomy between embracing and rejecting AI advancement.