Why I won't be using AI to write our next children’s opera

B'Opera's Hello Bird, Hello Fish! in Sparkhill, Birmingham

Ah, AI - the world’s favourite new toy. Last year someone got wind of the fact that we were creating a new piece of children’s first opera-theatre about clouds, and decided to ask Chat GPT to come up with a draft for a song, which they then shared with us. 

It went:

(Verse 1)

In the sky so high, where the blue meets white,

There's a magical world, such a wondrous sight.

Clouds of every kind, big and small,

Drifting and dancing, above us all.

(Chorus)

Cumulus, cumulus, fluffy and round,

Like giant cotton balls, floating off the ground.

Stratus, stratus, a blanket so wide,

Covering the sky, where the sun likes to hide.

It went on like that. We didn’t use it.

Nature abhors a vacuum and nothing inspires anxiety in people like an unfinished project. With 10 weeks from funding confirmation to performance, that anxiety can be intense.

It's true that AI is creating efficiency and time-saving that could barely be imagined by most of us ten years ago. With help from ChatGPT I sorted out a thorny website issue recently that had dragged on for years. I’m a fan. 

But using it to “create” (inverted commas because AI is drawing on material that real people have created, often without their consent, which is just… filtering, editing and organising, isn't it? Oh and also stealing.), is problematic and here's why:

Accuracy

I’m pretty sure most people don't bother to fact check AI, but a short cautionary tale - when I asked ChatGPT to make me an itinerary for a trip to Paris, it told me confidently that the Louvre was closed on Mondays and open on Tuesdays, even going into a chatty amount of detail about how busy it was likely be on Tuesday since it was closed the day before. This is completely back to front - it’s open on Mondays and closed on Tuesdays - and a really basic factual error - the Louvre opening times are freely and easily available on their website and hundreds of other sites. How can such a potentially sophisticated piece of tech get something so simple so wrong?

Another time I experimented with asking AI to transpose a simple folksong from bass clef to treble clef - it told me confidently - sound familiar? - that it was going to redraw manually a treble clef and transpose the music. “Manually”? Are you kidding me? With what hands? 

It proceeded to give me a weird looking box shape and then nothing further. Knowing its own limits doesn’t appear to be a strong suit for AI.

If you’re using it to generate stuff to publish, and you’re doing your job properly, you’ve got to ask some serious questions.

Creative sector under fire

The creative sector is under fire in shocking ways. The decimation of arts industries in the UK over the last few years has been astonishing, particularly when you consider the amount of money they bring into our country in the form of tourism, as the toll of Brexit, Covid and an anti-arts agenda at a political level have driven exceptional, highly trained and hard-working creatives out of the country and arts careers in droves. Travelling to relatively nearby Italy for an industry symposium, I was amazed by the different climate surrounding music and theatre - the government sponsored networking and training and ideas sharing that I was able to be part of, leading to sharing of excellent practice and an incredible energy and vitality in the sector.

Who’s driving?

Who is in the driving seat? If we don’t want to have to think, then AI is great isn’t it. If we want to save time on mundane tasks, AI is also great. If we want to bypass process and create end product content that literally anyone could create at the press of a button, then AI is great. I can think of lots of things you might want to use it for.

But creating theatre with and for children and families is not one of them, and here’s why. 

Relationships

B’Opera’s work is underpinned by the relationships we’ve spent years building with families. We are constantly exploring ways of creating work with those families in meaningful ways. One of our recent pieces for children, Hello Bird, Hello Fish! was created with the Sparkhill community - their words, languages, cuisine, textures, tragedies, joys, humour, movements and ideas all found their way into the piece. Noisy Fish’s orange and black stripy tiger-fish costume was inspired by the little boy from the nursery who insisted that there were tigers under the sea. The fun game of frozen fish fingers will forever be suffused with the sadness of witnessing nursery children using it to process and explore the death of one of their classmates. 

As we build relationships with people, their experiences and their stories, our work takes on their voices and becomes rich in meaning. How can AI create that? And why on earth would we want or expect it to? What would we gain? Time saving instead of time savouring?

Our work is creating shared meaning, and in creating shared meaning, we create and strengthen communities.

Attribution and ownership

Then we have the sticky subject of attribution. One element of best practice in our field of the arts and Early Years Music is to seek to avoid plagiarism and cultural appropriation. Taking the time to research and acknowledge where, for example, a song comes from, is important and yields interesting information - we learn something valuable from our research and rigour.

You may have heard the recent furore as authors including Sir Philip Pullman, discovered that their books had been “scraped” - pirated without consent to train generative AI systems.

Toby Walsh, a leading AI researcher and Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales, describes the actions of the billion dollar tech companies behind this theft, as the "greatest heist in human history”. Sounds almost glamorous doesn’t it? It’s not. Passing other people’s time and hard work off as your own is cheap, tacky, ill mannered, and really bad practice.

Cultural Bankruptcy

Like many other creatives, I have the privilege of teaching and mentoring young people hoping to work in the arts. Something that keeps me awake at night is the question, what opportunities will there be for them? Never an easy path, the creative arts are starting to look less like a path and more like a yawning chasm filled with snapping hyenas, which our children are expected to cross on a frayed tightrope. All very well for Meta to steal author’s work using Facebook’s founding motto “Move fast and break things”, but at what cost? And what are they breaking? Livelihoods? Whole industries? 

Productivity at all cost?

Underneath the flurry of excitement about AI is the notion that it’s better to produce more in less time, and of course AI is excellent at this. It will research a topic for us in the twinkling of an eye, saving us hours (though using enormous amounts of electricity and water to do so). But creativity and theatre-making don't exist to reinforce patriarchal capitalist norms. In fact, they provide a space to reflect, re-order, change our minds, experience shifting paradigms, understand others, empathise, make sense of our lives…

So much beauty, so much challenge, so much that is unexpected and hard to measure comes out of the arts, which is why they refuse to be contained by numbers and quantitative measurements.

Where is all this going?

Maybe the rapid development of AI is doing us a favour by forcing us to ask an important question - what we want and why.

If being a human is about getting to the end in the shortest amount of time possible, AI is a great tool. 

Just bear in mind what the end is.

If being human involves the pursuit of a creative, rounded existence full of self-expression, fulfilment and growth, then maybe we need to think about where we put our energies and how much agency we want to abdicate.

Maybe AI can do it. Isn’t it time we ask “Do I want AI to do it?” 

Do I want to give away my agency on this particular topic?”

AI might be the world's new favourite toy, but, as any parent knows, children soon jettison new toys, especially the ones that do everything for them, in favour of the cardboard box - so many more possibilities.

Zoë Challenor

B’Opera’s Fluffball the Flighty Cloud took flight safely on 6th July 2024 thanks to round the clock work from an extraordinary team, and is now floating around the Midlands on tour, visiting thousands of children and their families and celebrating the value of play and imagination.

Find out more at https://www.bopera.co.uk/fluffball and enquire about touring from team@bopera.co.uk