Midweek News Podcast, Velocity Fund, PAFA, Shakespeare, Tap Performance, AI Bias

Roberta: Hello everyone, this is Roberta.

Ryan: This is Ryan, and this is the midweek news.

Roberta: This is Artblog Radio. Good morning, Ryan. Good morning. I hope you’re staying cool. It’s been another awful day. I can’t believe it. I want to tell you about two pieces of news that I’m excited about. One in particular is the Velocity Fund.

Artblog is happy to announce that Velocity Fund has found a new host in the Asian Arts Initiative, a fantastic non-profit serving the Asian arts community, headquartered on Vine Street. I’m not sure how long Velocity Fund has been around, but it’s been a while. I haven’t done the due diligence to find the numbers, but they’ve been a grant maker for many years and believe in directly funding artists who do projects in the community.

These are projects that we’ve supported. We’ve been media partners with Velocity Fund from the beginning. And I’ll be interviewing three of their current and future grant recipients, which will be featured on Artblog. And in the fall, Velocity Fund will be putting out an open call for artists they want to contribute.

Supporting community art projects. This is also a re-grant program of the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts. It’s a really great program. I’m really happy that it found a new host in the Asian Art Initiative. It seems like a great fit. The other thing I want to say is that it seems to be continuing.

Chaos is probably too big a word, but chaos continues to rage at PA. Anna Marley was the longtime curatorial director at PA, a highly respected and fastidious curator at the museum, and she has just announced that she will be taking the position of curatorial director at the Toledo Museum of Art.

We wish her the best. She was a great curator in Philadelphia and, as I said, very well respected. We’re going to miss her. You know, Pennsylvania has lost quite a few curators in the last few years. And I believe they’re building museums again. We wish her the best. And those are the two big things that I wanted to mention. Ryan, points of note.

Now, let me hand the baton over to you.

Ryan: It’s great. There are a lot of events going on. There’s a lot of new things happening in July. First of all, for people who celebrate Bastille Day, Bastille Day just passed. I watch a lot of the Tour de France. I ride bikes, so I like that kind of thing. So it’s always fun to watch Vi La France.

Well, it’s been all over the news. I’m sure a lot of you saw the $100 million Broad Street renovation, which I’ll get to at some point. But it’s really interesting. I’ve seen some images. Tell me what you think about that. I’d love some feedback on what you all saw and what you think about the topic.

I’ll talk about that later. We have a lot of really exciting events coming up. First, one that I’m really looking forward to is Lady Hoofers, a non-profit tap group here in Philadelphia, and they’re doing a free event tomorrow, July 18th, at Dilworth Park. It’s City Hall, and it looks like a lot of fun. And the weather’s going to be cooler, so I’m really looking forward to it.

The Icebox just had its opening for everyone. Apparently it was a big show that opened last week. It’s the second Thursday and runs until August 17th. It’s a show worth seeing. Over 200 people in it and it looks massive. Definitely worth seeing. It’s at Crane Arts. It’s on display now.

We want to celebrate Iffy Books’ 3rd anniversary. Their birthday is July 20th. They’re located at 404 South 20th Street. If you haven’t heard of Iffy Books yet, you should definitely check them out.

As always, this week’s theater story. Last week or two ago, I told you about Shakespeare in the Park, which is currently running at Clark Park. Of course it’s running. I’ve already mentioned it. But as you all said, it runs from the 24th to the 28th. And this week, it’s another Shakespeare story: Delaware Shakespeare’s production of Julius Caesar at Lockwood Park in Wilmington, which opens tomorrow, July 18th, and will run through August 4th.

So those are my big calendar events, check them out. And Roberta, as I do sometimes, I’ve been messing around with an AI art generator.

Roberta: Well, maybe you do, but I don’t. Tell me, what did you find?

Ryan: I was playing around with Microsoft. As a non-profit, we were looking at different Microsoft products to see if there was anything that could help us in our day to day work. And then I stumbled across Microsoft’s image generator. It’s free to use and allows a certain number of generation per day. You enter text and it displays a graphic of what you’ve written. So I asked them what were some fun art prompts to see if the AI ​​would generate more text.

Then we do graphic prompts, prompts like professional artists painting on canvas in three-quarter profile. I was a little surprised that, maybe naively, I would say that they could all be broadly described as white straight men painting on canvas in three-quarter profile. Wow. I don’t know why I was surprised, but I was rather surprised. So I thought that was interesting. So I picked some other adjectives. Female professional artist. What would that look like? Interesting. I only got three. I should get four, but for some reason I got stuck and only got three. So I thought, what would nonbinary look like?

Well, that was interesting. What does a BIPOC professional artist look like? And it sheds light on what the algorithm thought, and what a queer professional artist looks like. And again, it wasn’t what I expected. So here’s a link to the image generator, and a thumbnail of the image it created:

I’d love to know what you guys think. There’s still talk of AI taking over, but I hope the current model generators don’t take over. Because they’re pretty racist. That’s pretty bad. You’re saying,

Roberta: good,

Ryan: They’ve known this for a while now, so you’d think they’d fix it.

Roberta: Not to stereotype anyone, but when I think of tech geeks, the first thing that comes to mind without any thought is white men. White men come to mind. Hmm. I mean, it’s in the culture that we live in, white culture, so I think it’s white people who are programming the AI. Or because AI doesn’t come out of nowhere. Somewhere, humans give the AI ​​ideas and let it play, and then the AI ​​grows and generates and at some point it comes into its own and takes over the world.

But conspiracy theorists aside, who are the first people in the tech industry to embed prompts and personalities into this AI? Well, that’s

Ryan: I don’t know if it necessarily has a personality. It’s built on what you find on the internet. So, at the very least, this may be a reflection of our culture, our society. It’s kind of what we’ve built. As for the creators of the AI ​​themselves, the people who are creating these large language models, maybe that’s not the intention. They care less about what it produces and more about whether it works fast and is exactly what you want it to be and is built on what the culture and society sees.

So, to me, it’s more of a reflection of society than it is of what the so-called tech guys are producing. What do we think of when we think of an artist? Did you think of one? White, cisgender, straight male. Well, maybe. So maybe it’s a reflection of ourselves. What are we producing?

So, I think that’s not our intention, especially at Artblog. It’s not our goal, it’s not our desire, it’s not what we’re trying to build ourselves into. So it was interesting to see that that’s the outcome we got from Microsoft. Well, it’s not that their developers are contributing more to the general public.

Roberta: Yeah. This company is called Open AI, and it’s a big company that does all the big AI stuff, but I don’t think it’s actually open. You know, there’s no such thing. It already comes with a chain, it’s built in, it’s collecting data. So who’s looking for image generation?

And that may be a reflection of who is searching online. And it’s, you know, highly hierarchical. So what comes up first, what comes up next? We don’t know. It’s complicated. The algorithms are complicated, but humans create the algorithms. We don’t generate the algorithms ourselves.

Once it’s published, it may be tweaked by an AI, but someone, maybe correct isn’t the right word, had to write or create the original algorithm. I don’t know who that was, but that person was a human being and they would describe it in a certain way. Ryan, I don’t know, but I get what you’re saying. But I think whoever is searching or interacting with all of this is also biased in a certain way.

Yes. But it’s really kind of scary. I’d love to see some examples of that. I’d love to see some images of that. Have you saved some images of that?

Ryan: Of course. I’ll mention it in the description.

Roberta: Understood.

Ryan: In the show notes.

Roberta: That’s great. That’s fun. Yeah.

Ryan: Yes, we welcome your feedback. Let us know what you think.

Roberta: Okay. Well, that’s all I have to say. Ryan, is there anything else? That’s it from me. Is there anything else? Okay. So I just want to wrap up by saying, stay cool, guys. I think it will cool down at some point, but good luck, stay hydrated, and come back next week. I’ll see you there.

Ryan: Okay. Thanks for listening, everyone. That’s it for the All Week News from Artblog Radio. Ryan here.

Roberta: I’m Roberta. Bye.

Ryan: bye bye.