"We have changed our collective tastes in response to technological progress in the past. We’ll now do it again, without even noticing that it’s happening. And if history is any indication, our tastes will evolve in a way that rigs the game in favor of human artists." - Wired
An arbitrator "in a decision issued last month that has not been previously reported, ruled that the Met should compensate Netrebko for 13 canceled performances," which means the opera company owes the Russian soprano more than $200,000. - The New York Times
AI image and text generation is pure primitive accumulation: expropriation of labour from the many for the enrichment and advancement of a few Silicon Valley technology companies and their billionaire owners. - The Guardian
Much of the reluctance to do what climate change requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for austerity. But what if it meant giving up things we’re well rid of, from deadly emissions to nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction? - Washington Post
The advancement of generative artificial intelligence is not an advancement toward artificial personhood for a simple, absolute reason: There is no falsifiable thesis of consciousness. You cannot find a researcher who can define, in a testable way, what consciousness is. - The Atlantic
For nearly two decades, Tina Chancey and her ensemble, Hesperus, have been assembling and performing live music — songs and instrumental works from the Middle Ages, along with period-style improvisation — to accompany such classic silent films as The Mark of Zorro, Robin Hood, and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. - Early Music America
Arifa Akbar: "Crunching or chewing can be a distraction, especially in the confines of the older, tighter West End venues, but theatre is a group activity. … The group experience is what we come for – and that includes jostling in the foyer, coughing, rustling and, yes, eating or drinking." - The Guardian
Burny Mattinson became a messenger at Disney, beginning a career that would eventually make him the longest-tenured employee of the company (just shy of seventy years) and one of the last still at the company to have started there when Walt Disney himself was running it. - The New Yorker
"Recently, two of the team's investigators … agreed to answer questions from The New York Times. They declined to comment on the Basquiat case, citing the ongoing investigation. But they discussed the origin and purpose of the Art Crime Team, and the public's increased interest in it. - The New York Times
Vinyl revenue grew 17% and topped $1.2 billion last year, making up nearly three-quarters of the revenue brought in by physical music. At the same time, CD revenue fell 18% to $483 million, the RIAA said. - NPR
The survey "exposes how many artists, especially those from less privileged backgrounds, have to sustain multiple additional jobs to subsidise poorly paid commissions in the public sector. Some told of deciding to leave the art world entirely to protect their mental health and financial security." - The Guardian (UK)
“If you take the top 10,000 YouTube videos by performance and dub them in 20-plus languages, you could easily unlock an additional half a trillion to a trillion views,” he told Rest of World. - Rest of World
Think of it as an ongoing planetary spam event, but unlike spam—for which we have more or less effective safeguards—there may prove to be no reliable way of flagging and filtering the next generation of machine-made text. “Don’t believe everything you read” may become “Don’t believe anything you read” when it’s online. - The Atlantic
Morgan Library director of conservation Maria Fredericks: "The glove thing. It just won't die." Grolier Club director Eric Holzenberg: "Every time it comes up, I sigh deeply. And then I give my three-sentence explanation of why it's ****." And the explanation does make sense. - The New York Times
Studios, agents, and sometimes the talent themselves try to manipulate Academy voters and the press by hiring consultants, buying ads, throwing events, pestering people, staging photo ops, and sometimes even dropping dirt on competitors. - The New York Times Magazine
Molly Johnson has achieved at the highest level in Canada, with the awards to match: “I gotta say I was depressed. It saddened me, initially, deeply, that here I am in this stage of my career and I still can’t really pay my bills." - Toronto Star
Using around 90 per cent of the brain-imaging data, the pair trained a model to make links between fMRI data from a brain region that processes visual signals, called the early visual cortex, and the images that people were viewing. - New Scientist
One of the advantages of RadioGPT is that it knows about an artist or a song or about a current event, so it can speak to a broad range of topics concisely and in an entertaining way. When we set up RadioGPT voices, this is not text-to-speech. This is setting up character and personality in A.I. - Slate
