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AI Coming For ESPN Commentators

by:

Joe Patti

There’s a kinda meme image circulating where a person says they had imagined a future where AI made her work easier so that she had more time for creative leisure. Instead, AI is being used to generate creative work.

The unspoken conclusion is that the woman continues to be stuck working hard.

Additionally there is an increasing skepticism about any sort of creative work being the result of the artist. I was watching artists presenting proposals for public art installations in the last two weeks and each made very specific disclaimers about what in their presentations was AI generated. (Largely, it was the streetscapes in which the proposed art work was positioned.)

Economist Tyler Cowen recently posted a job listing which was paying people with sports expertise pretty well to evaluate AI tools analysis of basketball games. As a number of commenters noted, people would essentially be training their replacements.

Since I have already seen an AI translate foreign language into English from video and match the energy of the speaker, I imagine it won’t be long before AI is doing analysis and color sports commentary in real time, drawing from existing reporting about injuries and career history.

I guess there is potential for these tools to be applied to reviews of performances and lead to a return of arts coverage. Though I imagine that would be a lot tougher to identify the nuances in technique and tempo in dance and music those fans want vs. analysis of a basketball game. One obvious concern in addition to this tool replacing human writers is AI reviewing work created by AI.

Here is the job description Cowen posted.

Role Overview
We’re looking for Basketball experts — avid fans, sports journalists, commentators, and former or semi-professional players — to evaluate basketball games. You’ll watch basketball games and answer questions in real time assessing the quality, depth, and accuracy of AI insights, helping us refine our AI’s basketball reasoning, storytelling, and strategic understanding.

Key Responsibilities
Game Evaluation: Watch basketball games and review AI-generated play-by-play commentary and post-game analysis.

Performance Scoring: Rate the accuracy, insight, and entertainment value of AI sports coverage.

Context & Understanding: Assess the AI’s grasp of player performance, game flow, and strategic decisions.

Error Detection: Identify factual mistakes, poor interpretations, or stylistic inconsistencies.

Feedback Reporting: Provide clear written feedback highlighting strengths, weaknesses, and improvement opportunities.

Collaboration: Work with analysts and developers to enhance the AI’s basketball-specific reasoning and realism.

Source

Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations, creativity, Working In The Arts

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Australian Teen – You’re A Rebellious Art Lover

by:

Joe Patti

Imagine, just as you have gotten with the times and started to effectively use social media to communicate and engage with younger audiences, the tool is yanked away.

That is kinda what is happening in Australia where a new social media ban on those under 16 went into effect in early December. The Art Newspaper had contacted a number of museums in that country to get their take on what the impact would be. Some said there wouldn’t be a lot of impact because most of their attendees weren’t under 16.

Others said they had been working on cultivating engagement with teenage audiences and had seen their attendance skew younger.

However, Russell notes that “increasingly teenage audiences are a focus for museums and galleries in Australia,” adding that “some social media platforms are used strategically to engage these audiences—platforms like TikTok, for example, have offered museums and galleries opportunities to communicate their content and collections in new ways, often playfully, engaging younger audiences with cultural collections.”

[…]

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), for example, attracts a young demographic through its doors, with 50% of its visitors under the age of 35, according to a museum spokesperson. “Youth engagement is very important to MCA, and we provide options for all ages to engage across our platforms, programs and events—including our website, e-newsletters for families and parents, free access to the museum for under 18s, free group visits for school and tertiary students, and deep engagement through selected school and community outreach programs,’ 

Source

It will be interesting to see what direction arts organizations who would like to increase the participation of younger people may take. Messaging to parents to encourage they bring their kids utilizes a different appeal than those used with the kids themselves.

On the other hand, use of social media may be too engrained in younger people to effectively ban. Apparently young Australians are using their parent’s accounts, using VPNs that make it look like they live in other countries, migrating to new apps that aren’t currently covered by the ban. Arts organizations may find they can continue to achieve their goals by creating content for consumption by a group that technically isn’t supposed to be accessing it. In fact, there may be some value in messaging that reinforces the rebellious identity the teens & tweens feel when they are circumventing the ban.

Little post script– Case in point, Aussie museum are missing out on the opportunity to promote to the kiddies like the National Gallery of Art did today for their Open Call to remix their art work. You have to be 18+ to enter, but folks too much older than that may not understand the video.

Uncategorized

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Artists Increasingly Need To Subsidize Their Shows. Would Previews Before Official Opening Help?

by:

Joe Patti

A recent report in The Art Newspaper addressed an issue of which I was entirely unaware – Visual artists are essentially being forced to pay for their own shows as a result of so much funding to museums and galleries being cut. I have run into situations where relatively new artists underestimated the cost/labor of the commission they agreed to do, but this seems to be a separate issue entirely.

Across the US, artists report being called on to subsidise budgets for museum exhibitions, public commissions and even acquisitions. In some cases, opportunities evaporate entirely when the artist and organisation are unable to raise the money needed for production.

Source

They point to the funding cuts on the state and federal level, including the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Institute of Museum and Library Services as part of the reason artists are being asked to subsidize their work. Though the article says artists have always been burdened by this expectation to a degree.

If an organisation needs to cut spending immediately, it cuts production budgets,” says Stephen Reily, the founding director of Remuseum, … “That cost is then redistributed, often invisibly, to artists, galleries or external partners.”

[…]

For Ishii, the gap between some museums’ public rhetoric and on-the-ground economics is telling. “Historically, museums have defined their mission around stewardship of objects, not stewardship of artists,” she says. “Their accountability structures prioritise preservation, acquisition and scholarship. Supporting the labour of living artists has never been built into the financial architecture.”

Source

The article notes that artists are rarely at the table when curatorial policy is discussed. It is generally people who view art through the lens of the market – “Collectors, trustees, dealers-—very few artists”

There are various solutions suggested such as changing tax deduction rules which allow collectors to deduct the full market value of the art they donate, but limits artists to deducting the cost of materials.

Other suggestions were related to how exhibitions open in museums, including allowing access to the public in the weeks prior to the official opening in a way that sounds similar to Broadway preview performances prior to opening night. The goal seems to be to provide time for the public to engage, perhaps create a little buzz that attracts sponsorships, and gain, heretofore hidden, insight into the process of creating works and pulling an exhibition together.

Art(ist) Education, Arts Facilities, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Marketing/PR, Working In The Arts

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Making Videos Illustrating Venue Accessibility

by:

Joe Patti

Pretty much every public event space, including theaters, will receive questions about the accessibility of their spaces and programs. There are even more questions when the space is a historic building since staircases, doorways, and hallways tend to be narrower and elevators or lifts between levels may not exist.

We will often have spouses, family, and friends visit our theater in advance of an event so they can walk the potential seating locations and pathways themselves.

Last month an organization serving people with disabilities arranged for a mini-concert with one of the artists performing at our venue. They asked to come in a few weeks in advance to make a video so their participants would know what to expect when they visited. The video showed the entrance, view from the wheelchair seating, location of the restrooms and what it looked like to navigate those spaces, location of the stairs, width of the aisles between seating sections and rows.

They provided us with a copy of the video to post on our website so that other visitors could have that information and possibly not need to visit the venue in advance to scout the space.

It was definitely useful to have someone making the video who was experienced at providing a useful viewpoint. The way they proceeded through the space and started panning from a specific point was different from how I think I would have shot the space. That said, the experience did suggest we could have probably made a similar video ourselves.

This summer, we did for example, create a video directing people to an alternate entrance they should use while the street in front of the theater was under construction. That took a bit of coordination and stitching together.

You can see the accessibility video and the one directing people to our super secret entrance on our webpage – https://www.rialtotheatercenter.org/general-information/

Has anyone seen good examples of accessibility videos/digital tours hosted by other event venues?

Arts Facilities, Audience Relations

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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