A Month of Tech Controversies

Each passing month of 2022 seems to give us no shortage of controversial tech-related news that has implications for the nonprofit arts sector. It’s a reminder that technology is constantly changing our ecosystem, sending ripples through every industry. The following stories exhibit the ways in which large companies in the tech sector overstepped their roles and abused their power. As for what the fallout from these circumstances means for the future of the arts, it isn’t all that clear yet. All we can do is stay tuned and remain hopeful that policy changes will help to regulate their actions.

Senate antitrust panel to hold hearing after ticketmaster’s Taylor Swift ticket sale disaster

Taylor Swift singing into a microphone. — Figure 1. Source: Flickr

The US Senate announced it would hold a hearing on Ticketmaster's “dominant market position,” according to a Reuters article by Diane Bartz. When tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour went on sale, fans dealt with long wait times, website outages, poor customer service, and order cancellations. Fans, despite these ongoing issues, had to rely only on a broken Ticketmaster in hopes of receiving much-awaited tickets. Taylor Swift’s tour promotion company, AEG Presents, blamed the disaster on Ticketmaster entirely, saying that they didn’t have a choice when it came to working with Ticketmaster. Live Nation Entertainment, Ticketmaster’s parent company, controls an estimated 60% of the market for promotion of major concerts and events. The Senate’s antitrust panel says this power creates a lack of incentive to “continually innovate and improve” and that this harms customers and artists alike.

ongoing tech layoffs and failures could lead to infrastructure breakdown and federal legislation

Various recent debacles at Twitter have been taking on headlines. There’s been no shortage of controversy surrounding Twitter’s new CEO, Elon Musk. However, Twitter is only one of several other Big Tech companies that are laying off significant portions of their workforce. Meta notably laid off over 11,000 of its employees earlier this month. An article from Wired estimates that the total number of tech layoffs is somewhere in the six figures. The fall of cryptocurrency exchange FTX and investigations into Sam Bankman-Fried’s mishandling of funds launched a new initiative in the Senate to create legislation to regulate crypto and other digital assets. Several bipartisan bills in Congress would allocate more regulatory responsibility to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and increase antitrust protection in the marketplace against the power held by Big Tech companies.

artificial intelligence continues to disrupt the arts, but new lawsuit could be key to its future

Generative AI practices are rising in popularity in industries such as marketing, software, and design. While there are several advantages to using this type of technology, there are also many issues that are just starting to be formally addressed. One such issue is ownership of the generated works due to their reliance on AI training via existing works. A lawsuit against GitHub’s Copilot tool could change things for all AI-generated content. A group of coders who filed the suit noticed that some snippets of code that Copilot will “occasionally reproduce recognizable snippets of code cribbed from the millions of lines in public code repositories” of OpenAI, the source of the generative AI’s training. At this point, it’s too early to tell what the outcome will be. But given the recent controversies surrounding AI used to create artistic works, the ruling could be pivotal for artists and arts managers.