The Flyers’ South Philly arena renderings got a fast makeover after people noticed the original version leaned heavily male.
The images, released Tuesday morning, were generated with artificial intelligence and showed fans arriving at the new arena that the Flyers and Sixers are tied to. After the first version drew attention for a lack of women in the crowd, the rendering on the project’s website appears to have been updated.
The change was spotted and shared online, with the updated image showing a noticeably different mix of fans. The original rendering had one woman that could be counted, plus an identical version of her one step up, facing the opposite direction. In the revised version, there are 15 women counted up to the top of the stairs, where the crowd gets blurry and harder to make out.
That works out to a plus-14 swing.
The renderings carry the logos of four organizations, though it’s unclear whether the Flyers or Sixers themselves created them. The design firm appears to be Populous, while the architecture is being handled by Moody Nolan Design.
Still, the reaction has been pretty muted overall, which is part of why this whole thing feels more goofy than serious. The people most worked up about it, the source noted, are the chronically online Heated Rivalry fans and anime-avatar types who get upset over this sort of thing.
For most female Flyers fans, the idea that an AI image put too many men into a background crowd doesn’t seem worth losing sleep over. It’s a rendering, not a yearbook photo or a season-ticket brochure.
And if the fix was as simple as giving the image a more balanced crowd, then so be it. One way or another, the women have arrived.
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