Sometimes, changing tech is akin to a flavor of the week. But clearly, AI can make massive changes to how we build websites and what’s important about them, to say nothing of its impacts on the world well beyond websites.
Knowing that, we want to make sure to be clear with our clients, and our potential clients, about how we use AI here at Sterner Stuff.
The Short Version
Here’s what to expect at Sterner Stuff.
With concerns about the economics of AI, its impact on our environment, how it retrains our brains, the ethics of LLM datasets, and the overall insufferable nature of interacting with sycophantic AI agents, Sterner Stuff is not providing generative AI agents with open-ended prompts to create content or websites.
We will not, even at client direction, use AI to generate images to be used on websites. We will continue to offer to source free, open source images from artists who have either elected to give away their work or have reached mass licensing agreements with photography distribution platforms.
There is an amount of AI that is inevitable. So long as we use Google, we’re getting AI-generated results. Our code editors have AI built in that can identify trends in what we’re doing to make replicating and refactoring faster. And when a client emails us a list that needs to be reordered or if one-off data needs reformatted, these basic tasks can be offloaded to an AI tool that, in most cases, can even perform that work entirely locally without ringing up a data center and draining a pond.
But for creative work, we believe artists and creators should be compensated for their work. We believe there’s value in human-centered approaches to communicating with other humans. You won’t get emails from us generated by an AI agent.
We’ll continue to publish more specifics about our AI approach. We’ll get into what you might see from other agencies, what AI is currently capable of, how you can meet your customers who are using AI even when you aren’t, and might even get deeper into some of the concerns we have around AI.
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