(Un)read in the ledger

Weekly reading list: Monday 6–Sunday 12 May 2024

Elliott Bledsoe
(Un)read in the ledger
4 min readMay 12, 2024

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Open AI is upping its opt out options, MONA intends to challenge claims the Ladies Lounge is discriminatory and Cumberland Council politicises book censorship.

Read

What I’ve been reading the week:

Our approach to data and AI
Open AI has announced they will build a tool called Media Manager to “… enable creators and content owners to tell us what they own and specify how they want their works to be included or excluded from machine learning research and training.” They aim to have it running by next year. So far, that’s all the details we have on the tool and what it will do.
Tuesday 7 May 2024
Open AI

https://bit.ly/3UG8Owi

Mona heads to Supreme Court in fight to keep Ladies Lounge for women
MONA is appealing the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal finding that the Ladies Lounge was discriminatory to the Supreme Court of Tasmania. Artist Kirsha Kaechele’s reasoning is not just for the Lounge itself, but because “We need to challenge the law to consider a broader reading of its definitions as they apply to art and the impact it has on the world, as well as the right for conceptual art to make some people (men) uncomfortable.” This will be one to watch.
Gabriella Coslovich – Tuesday 7 May 2024
The Sydney Morning Herald

Is the secret of arts marketing really to ‘know thyself’?
I love how simply Jo Pickup explains the ideal for arts marketing and how hard it is to get that. Media is fragmenting in lots of directions making arts marketers’ jobs harder. Pickup discusses research published by Advisory Board of the Arts (ABA) that shows arts organisations with a strong core institutional brand (i.e. strong core values evident in their brand) saw growth between 2018–19 and 2022–23. I have long said that arts organisations need to better understand their brands and that marketing communications is about translating business planning concepts such as vision, mission, purpose, values, goals and objectives into messages that mean something to audiences. Seems synergistic.
Jo Pickup — Wednesday 8 May 2024
ArtsHub

What’s in the same-sex parenting book banned by Cumberland City councillors in Western Sydney
Cumberland City Council in Western Sydney narrowly voted to ban Same-Sex Parents by Holly Duhig and other same-sex parenting literature from their libraries. The motion was pushed for by former mayor Councillor Steve Christou, citing how religious and family-orientated the local community is. It isn’t surprising given the majority of electorates that voted ‘no’ in the same sex marriage plebiscite were in Western Sydney. But this erks me. Councillor Christou even admitted he hadn’t read Duhig’s book, making this seem more political than ‘think of the children’ to me. I totally agree with the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) that people should be free to decide what books they borrow from their public library (which is supported by the Australian Publishers Association (APA) and Books Create Australia).
Holly Tregenza — Wednesday 8 May 2024
ABC News, Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Add it to the pile

New additions to the unread pile:

Artists as Workers: An economic study of professional artists in Australia
The seventh report by Throsby and Petetskaya tracking working conditions for professional artists has been released.
David Throsby and Katya Petetskaya – Monday 6 May 2024
Creative Australia

Of course, there’s lots of other stuff I have been reading that doesn’t make it into the weekly round up. If the long list is too much, I also group links into collections for AI, the arts, entertainment & content, Indigenous Knowledges, copyright, news, other IP, science and tech. (If you have a Google Account you can even share links with me.)

Reuse

You can’t keep a good idea to yourself. I believe in the power of open access to knowledge and creativity and a thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture. That’s why this blog post is licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons licence.

You can reuse the text of this blog post and any other copyright of mine under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0. Under the licence, you are free to copy, share and adapt this article, or any modified version you create from it, even commercially, as long as you acknowledge Elliott Bledsoe/Agentry as the original creator of it. So please make use of this article as you see fit.

Whether AI-generated outputs are protected by copyright remains contested. To the extend that copyright exists, if at all, in the banner image I generated using AI for this blog post (i.e. the first image at the top of the blog post), I also license it for reuse under the terms of the Creative Commons licence (CC BY 4.0).

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