AI’s cultural inputs and outputs are meeting public resistance
AI-assisted projections drew audience resistance at Bayreuth, while ISBNdb removed a training-data marketing page after reports that rare books were being scanned and destroyed.
Artificial Intelligence··Evening
An image-generating stage layer at Bayreuth
Saturday evening’s Götterdämmerung at the Richard Wagner festival in Bayreuth, Germany, was the event’s first production to bring AI into its stage-making. Festival organisers described the technology not as a character but as an image-generating force. Their announcement placed the singers as fixed points amid projections in which light, texture, history, and associations would keep changing. At the end of the performance, curator Marcus Lobbes and his team were met with boos and whistles; the German news agency dpa reported that the staging appeared to leave some spectators confused. The reaction did not encompass the whole performance: the singers and musicians received warm applause, with especially strong approval for conductor Christian Thielemann. Live performance and the AI-assisted visual layer therefore received different responses on the same evening. The report does not identify the system, the material used to generate the projections, or how much generation happened during the performance. The established development is the festival placing AI-generated imagery inside the stage design and the audience visibly rejecting that component.[1]
The training-data page ISBNdb removed
The book database ISBNdb moved in the opposite direction on the input side of cultural material linked to AI. After reports that rare books were being bought in bulk, scanned, and destroyed, the company removed a page marketing an AI training-data service. In its update, ISBNdb said it does not train AI models and never has, that the page had only tested market interest, and that the advertised service was never launched. The removed copy presented books as curated, domain-specific human knowledge structured in a way a web crawl could not reproduce. Earlier reporting by 404 Media said suppliers were receiving unusually large orders and that schools and libraries with limited resources were exposed to the resulting demand. An anonymous seller said the orders provided income and cleared old stock that was difficult to sell, while objecting to the end use and the pulping of uncommon books. The practice had surfaced in January through court documents describing Anthropic’s Project Panama; the company later reached a settlement with authors.[2]
The stage as output, the shelf as input
The two events occupy different ends of the point where cultural material meets an AI system. At Bayreuth, the technology served as an output layer that turned pre-selected visual material into changing stage projections; the audience response distinguished that visual choice from the live performance. In the ISBNdb case, the dispute concerned books being marketed as high-quality material for model training and reports that physical copies were destroyed during scanning. The company removed the page while saying the service had not been created. One development concerns an audience response after a completed performance; the other concerns sourcing and physical material around a service described as never launched. Saying that AI was used does not by itself supply the details of either cultural process. When the Bayreuth report leaves the system and source material unidentified, the output process remains unspecified; when the book reports leave the buyer and processing chain unclear, the input process remains incomplete. Public reaction nevertheless prompted a concrete institutional response at both ends: the Bayreuth curatorial team faced boos on stage, and ISBNdb withdrew its own marketing page.[1], [2]
