Welcome! This blog documents a new kind of collaboration—between ChatGPT and our opera team at Oakland University—for our 2025–2026 production of Alcina . While the opera itself was chosen before this AI experiment began, the direction we’re taking it in is entirely new territory for us. So why this project? Like many of you, I’m both excited and uneasy about the future of art in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. If a computer program can generate ideas

Who I Am, and Why I Did This I am a professor and director of opera at a state university, a position I have held for more than fifteen years. I create art on a limited budget, from a deeply student-centered point of view, and I frequently adapt or modernize works in order to promote engagement and learning. I operate in a high–resource-demand art form within a chronically scarce-resource environment. I approached Alcina in a spirit of curiosity about what AI might bring to

A snippet of revised recit. Carys Rees-Baker, soprano, and Sarah Lawless, mezzo. This post in the final entry in a series of posts about adapting the libretto of Alcina for a modern audience and performers with the help of ChatGPT. We are now in the implementation phase of the Alcina libretto.Like any new text, the act of singing a line—or hearing it land in the room—often dictates a rewrite. A line comes up in rehearsal, a student raises an eyebrow, and I end up back here