Thanks for the support, Ben!
CFAR has run European workshops in Czechia for many years, I think starting in... 2017 maybe, though with a break for the pandemic.
The venue used for workshops in 2022 was bought/is run by separate organizations from CFAR and holds a bunch of stuff besides CFAR workshops; I'm not totally up on what's going on over there or the financial situation with the venue but I believe at least some events are still being held there.
Before that venue was acquired CFAR ran a bunch of European CFAR workshops in other venues; insofar as that venue does end up having to close down or whatever it would not in principle prevent CFAR from doing workshops elsewhere, potentially going back to some of the sites it used in the past, etc.
FWIW CFAR workshops were not AIUI funded by Sam Bankman-Fried and are not officially discontinued -- though CFAR hasn't done mainline workshops for a while it's done various other less-public workshops and projects, and I think there's a good chance that there will be at least something similar to the old mainline CFAR workshops in the future...
(source: work for CFAR sometimes)
Whatever happened to AppliedDivinityStudies, anyway? Seemed to be a promising blog adjacent to the community but I just checked back to see what the more recent posts were and it looks to have stopped posting about a year ago?
What is a "chara inductor"?
I'm personally rather annoyed by all the AI discussion here and have been a lot less engaged recently. I would like to see much more rationality-type content.
I'm not sure I agree. The normal art project also requires a bunch of "art director time" -- there can be multiple rounds of back and forth between author and artist, different sketches or concepts to evaluate, and so on. If anything, I think there's more context-switching cost required for a traditional project because of the inherent major delay in creating traditional art.
In other words, if I have an AI art prompt that doesn't come out quite right, I know that very quickly and can then run another prompt to refine what I'm going for. If I have a traditional art prompt and a professional artist comes back a while later with sketches that aren't right, I can send them art direction to refine the project -- but doing so will impose more context-switching because of the delay on communications between us, the fact that these sketches/drafts will be arriving substantially after I've sent my initial piece, etc.
One other note is that CFAR has been holding some online test sessions recently while we develop new content for these workshops (and beyond!) -- if you're interested in checking out some of what we've been working on (potentially in a very unpolished form), you can sign up here to be on the test session mailing list!