In the last few weeks I came across a blog post by the CEO of the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, Patrick Fisher, laying out the ways in which the Arts Council would be using new technology tools and AI to serve their constituencies.

He wrote about how they would be using AI to create event calendar listings from publicly available sources as well as an AI Concierge service to answer questions artists, organizations, and community members might have about available resources. They are also working to create an online map of resources available in the Greater Pittsburgh area as well as an assessment tool to assess the health of the arts and cultural environment.

Fisher also spends a fair amount of time discussing the ethical considerations about using AI for some of these purposes. I am glad he does, not only because there are definitely ethical issues like bias, representation in the data used to train the AI model, and whether those providing the data/content gave permission for it to be used, but also due to the over arching need to make sure the information being provided is valid.

I had bookmarked the article about two weeks ago to return to write a post on the topic. However, this past weekend we had to contend with a ticket buyer who had gotten a notification that a performance had been postponed to a date in May. The best we could figure out is that the AI sending an alert to her phone had conflated the fact the performer Saturday night had been postponed from an early date with the date of another performer in May to decide Saturday’s performance was now in May.

This moved Fisher’s post to the top of my list of things to blog about. Fisher lists seven ethical considerations for using AI powered tools, lists entry points for use of AI which arts organizations might use to start integrating the tools into regular activities, and then makes the case for why arts organizations should start embracing these technologies.

He encourages a relatively balanced and deliberate approach to their use, writing: