No Gen-Ai at Banshees

I’ve been collecting ai generated flyers for two weeks to make this graphic. I have not been seeking them out. These images have all come from local groups, posted by local businesses, artists and markets. I have specifically only used images that could be de-identified. There were heaps more, integrated photos of specific people, brand names that have been fed into the machine.

There are so, so many of them.

We will not give them a platform again.

The normalisation of generative ai graphics sends the wrong message for a creative business, and an art space. It implies that human artists, photographers, graphic designers create valueless products which can be mined without consequence to train automation. The long term impacts of this are unimaginable. We never needed this technology in the arts before, and we don’t need it now. Gen-ai is not creating anything new.

We are an artist-forward business, run by a team made up of creatives from many backgrounds; from fine-arts degrees to punk bands, running live interactive video to published poetry, we all make music and have all designed posters for our gigs. We are proud to have a wide range of creatives in our regular crew, from musicians to dancers, poets, writers, artists, comedians and those who just love human creativity.
Banshees has always focussed on supporting, encouraging and platforming original, independent creatives and showcasing the alternative arts, both on our walls and our stage. Generative ai is the antithesis of this.

Presenting your music with generated images disrespects creatives from many disciplines, and also tarnishes your reputation as a musician. If you don’t care enough about your music to either pay an artist, create something yourself or use a photo, the audience will not expect you to put any more effort into your performance or your recordings. I, as the person who books this venue, will not expect you to put any more effort into advertising your show.

Banshees offers free graphic design services as part of your venue booking - so there is absolutely no need for you to use this technology for your show here.

All this is not even touching on the environmental effects of ai data centers. You can read about that all over the place, here’s one link to get you started:
https://www.greenpeace.org.au/greenpeace-reports/ai-data-centres-draining-energy-australia/

We’re not judging you based on flyers for gigs you played that you maybe had no ability to change, and we’re not scrolling back through your posts. Even we experimented with gen-ai in the early days, but once we discovered the environmental impacts we stopped this practice. So if your profile picture, album art or cover image is obviously generative ai, we are going to have doubts. If you send us an ai poster, we will replace it and wonder how we booked someone whose creative values are so different from ours.