We think that the use of what is commonly called “AI” is a net negative on our industry, our society, and our planet.
As such, we don’t use AI as any part of our workflow. We don’t have control over what other services we use are doing under the hood, but we never knowingly interact with AI.
As well as not using AI day-to-day, we won’t work on any project where the core purpose is something related to AI, and we won’t work on any feature whose core purpose is AI.
We aren’t going to try and convince you that AI is bad, everyone has seen the same environmental and ethical concerns that are raised again and again. If the feeling of productivity is worth more to you than those, that is your choice.
We have noticed a tendency for people to get very defensive over their use of AI, to be perfectly clear, this isn’t a gut reaction we’ve decided to run with, this is after some careful consideration and plenty of listening.
People have said to us before, what if they could solve the environmental and ethical issues associated with the industry. That isn’t going to happen since the industry is ran by inherently unethical players who historically haven’t cared about the environmental impact, supported by governments, who are one of the few entities which could have helped steer the industry in a better way.
Even if, hypothetically, AI use had no negative impact on the environment and was sourced from opt-in data sets, etc., etc. we still wouldn’t use it.
We like writing code, we like thinking about problems, we like committing our thoughts to a page. AI skips over all of the bits we like in order to come to something that somewhat resembles the same output with none of the joy in between. That isn’t for us.
Our advice to companies
When asked, we will work with our clients to develop policies and practices around not using AI.
Here is some general advice.
- Put a policy in place around AI use. When it is acceptable, when is it not? Which models are allowed and what safeguards or checks are being put in place.
- Encourage human interaction over “Asking ChatGPT”.
- Share a statement such as this one on your website. (If you do adopt one, please let us know).
- Put blocks in place to stop the ethical scrapers. The majority of scrapers ignore robots.txt. We use CloudFlare’s anti-AI features.