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Better Dubs For Your Favorite Anime May Be Just Around The Corner

October 30, 2023

by:

Joe Patti

The China Project recently spotlighted Taylor Swift’s amazing fluency in speaking Mandarin Chinese. It is amazing to think she is able to gain this level of proficiency while attending to her billion dollar business empire. Except that she can’t speak Chinese that well and the video of her, and others, doing so in the China Project piece were actually accomplished by a sophisticated piece of deepfake AI software which is impressively adept that mimicking a speaker’s natural voice and lip movements.

HeyGen’s “Video Translate” tool, which created the Swift deepfakes, is capable of translating footage into 14 different languages — including Mandarin, Hindi, and Arabic — and can clone the speaker’s voice and sync the person’s lips in an “authentic speaking style,” according to the company’s website.

[…]

On Weibo, fans of the tool praised it for its exciting potential to improve dubbing in foreign films, as it is able to match the movements of an actor’s mouth with their translated speech in Chinese. Others also pointed out that it could be an AI-powered solution to revolutionize Chinese ecommerce brands, which have found it difficult to reach global audiences due to a lack of dual-lingual livestreamers.

Others had the obvious concerns about the technology being used as a propaganda tool or to generate false content with which to accuse people of all sorts of wrong doing. The article reports that by moving to the US,

“…HeyGen is no longer subject to China’s deepfake rules, which went into effect in January. As one of the first governments to regulate hyper-realistic, AI-generated media, Beijing requires companies to obtain consent from individuals whose likenesses are being manipulated; deepfakes need to be labeled as such on the internet, and can’t be used for purposes deemed harmful (vaguely defined) to national security or the economy.

Similar rules regarding the use of AI to create content like this without some detectable markers or disclaimers indicating the content is fake is being contemplated in the US. An executive order along those lines were issued today.

But as the article suggests, tools like these could be a boon for arts organizations seeking to increase accessibility. Especially if they are able to work in real time to provide captioning and translations for performances, concerts, and lectures which may not have a formal script or translate notes and commentary in galleries (or whatever the tour guide is saying)

People may be more open to watching foreign films (or anime as I suggest in the title of this post) if the dubbing looks and sounds convincing. Though it will probably be bad news for the voice actors who currently make a living doing anime dubs.

Arts in an Age of Technology

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Covid Restrictions May Have Resulted In Increased Social Inertia

October 25, 2023

by:

Joe Patti

I recently saw a link on a CityLab story noting that since the end of Covid restrictions, people appear to be less willing to venture outside of familiar neighborhoods and locales.

As of late 2021, people remained less likely to engage in social exploration, which the study authors define as the likelihood of visiting a new place where they earn significantly more or less than than the general population. Instead, they just returned to familiar destinations.

[…]

Fewer people are visiting attractions like museums, restaurants or parks that are outside their immediate mobility radius, and they’re spending less time among residents at different socioeconomic levels.

Outside of the concerns operators of arts organizations, restaurants, parks and other attractions may have about a drop in attendance and purchases, this has implications for the overall social cohesion in the US. While most cities studied experienced this drop of mobility, places that had fewer restrictions on public assembly and in-person office work saw a smaller decrease in relation to how much people were willing to circulate to unfamiliar locations.

If the narrowed social mobility habits of residents endure, policymakers will have to contend with an extended loss in income-diverse encounters — a trend likely to further exacerbate political polarization and diminish social capital.

Yabe said the research could help decision-makers get a better sense of the trade-offs as they try to strike a balance between safety and social cohesion.

It should be noted that while this report came out in 2023, it appears the most recent data was from the end of 2021 when people were still a little wary about moving around. While this situation may not exist to the same extent as late 2021, the implications still bear attention.

General Musings, Government Relations

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Don’t Break Up With Volunteers Over Email

October 24, 2023

by:

Joe Patti

I recently saw an article about the Portland Art Museum essentially firing all their volunteer docents by email in favor of paid students with a suggestion that the docents weren’t diverse enough. I felt a sense of deja vu and couldn’t figure out why until I saw a brief mention of the Art Institute of Chicago doing something similar. Sure enough, I had linked to posts Drew McManus and Lee Rosenbaum had made in November 2021 about the Art Institute’s firing of docents by email in favor of paid staff due to the docents not being as diverse as the organization wanted.

Drew suggested the Art Institute had created a PR crisis by fumbling the process pretty soundly. I haven’t seen a similar uproar about Portland’s decision to do the same thing. The media landscape has certainly changed in many ways since November 2021.

While working aggressively to achieve diversity goals are absolutely laudable, as Drew pointed out the Art Institute had established qualifications for docents that pretty much only wealthy, older individuals could fulfill. It appeared they both jettisoned the structure of the docent program and the participants without any thought of a gradual integration or transition to a new model that would parlay their experienced volunteers.

“Once the news went public, there was a good bit of blow back, especially after the docent group’s spokesperson said the organization’s membership supports reaching diversity goals. What they wanted to know is why they were tossed to the curb without a replacement program ready to implement nor a plan to aggressively diversify over the period of a few years.

Given that volunteers were required to maintain eighteen months of twice-a-week training to qualify as a docent and five additional years of continual research along with a laundry list of other requirements, it’s not difficult to see why there would be concern.”

The Portland docents are being encouraged to join a new program where they can act as educators, greeters and coat-check helpers. Some of the docents had already had a sense that this was going to be the direction of things and feel a bit betrayed by how the transition was being handled.

One former docent, who declined to be named, didn’t feel blindsided like Dacklin did by changes to the council. Based on what happened to the docents in Chicago and all the equity consultants PAM brought in, she had felt the “foreboding” for a couple of years. She laughed at the idea of going back to PAM as a volunteer educator: “They burned their bridge.”

Dacklin feels similarly alienated. “I’m heartbroken,” she says, her voice brimming with emotion. “Will I go back to the museum and volunteer? I don’t know anyone that’s going to do it. But I don’t know everyone.”

Volunteers

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They Are Having More Fun In The Movie Screening Next Door

October 23, 2023

by:

Joe Patti

Recently I have been seeing articles heralding the Taylor Swift and Beyonce concert movies as the recipe for financial success for struggling movie theaters—turn movie attendance into an event.

Except that those articles might have gotten ahead of themselves because attendees of those events are expressing disappointment about their experiences. Essentially, its a matter of FOMO – fear of missing out- colliding with the one thing performance venues have been heralding as the biggest benefit of live events over recordings —every experience is different.

As a recent Slate article stated, the grass seemed greener at the screening the next theater over. Some attendees to the Taylor Swift Eras tour concert screening felt other people were having a rowdier experience than they were. Others felt like their screening was way too rowdy and they couldn’t hear Taylor. There were inevitable articles and social media posts about proper movie attendance etiquette.

Some of this hype came from Swift herself—when she announced the concert film in August, her social media statement included the line, “Eras attire, friendship bracelets, singing and dancing encouraged.” At real tour dates, fans have taken to dressing up and exchanging hand-beaded friendship bracelets, as well as vigorously singing and dancing along to the music, so Swift was setting the tone for the movie’s rollout, telling fans that they should feel free to pretend they were attending the genuine article.

[…]

But not everyone was happy about these situations: Some of the videos depicting fans having semi-religious experiences at the movie were accompanied by posts like this one, where a user complained, “I’m at the worst screening ever cant even hear taylor :)”

[…]

A writer for the A.V. Club shared of her moviegoing experience, “[S]eeing all those weeping fans onscreen in a silent, mostly empty theater with not even an AMC-branded friendship bracelet in sight rang especially hollow.” But she went through the grass-is-greener phenomenon in real time, going on to write, “While no one was in costume in my theater, I did take a pee break halfway through, which revealed an entirely different crowd from an earlier screening that had just let out.” The other audience had “more pink, more rhinestones, more souvenir popcorn buckets, and at least two limited edition folklore cardigans, so the vibe might have been totally different.”

Among the suggestions floated in the article were akin to the practice of scheduling accessible or sensory friendly shows. In this case there would be a choice between quiet and raucous.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, State of the Arts

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