AI policy

Rage against the machines

10 things I hate about AI

I hate the way you take our jobs
And the way you give bad advice
I hate the way you get things wrong
I hate it when you’re ‘nice’
I hate your big dumb data centres
And the way you make bad men rich
I hate you so much that it makes me sick
And even makes me itch
I hate the way you’ve ruined posters
I hate it when you lie
I hate it when you use our water
Even worse when you make people cry
I hate it that you’re always around
Even though we didn’t call
But mostly I hate the way you can’t even do the stuff you’re supposed to be good at
Not even close
Not even a little bit
Not even at all

[Important note: by AI I mean large language models (LLMs). The AI which is working on curing cancer etc is not the chatbot you’re using to organise your emails.]

Why is AI so awful?

Take your pick. Water use. Power use. Creating more wealth for billionaires while resulting in job loss for everyone else. Reducing people’s cognitive skills and creativity. Ugly images everywhere that all look the same. Giving simpletons something to rave about and shysters more stuff to to sell.

Having said all that, I don’t want to make people feel bad for every tiny use of AI. The background remover on Canva is technically AI. Spelling and grammar tools are useful for people with dyslexia. It can (sometimes) do summarising, reorganising and researching well (but please fact check!!!).

What I hate is every piece of software suddenly having it crowbarred in. People saying we should be using it for everything. People being frightened into thinking they’ll be left behind if they don’t adopt it. The only thing you’ll be behind with is helping tech bros to inflate their share price by pretending there’s demand for more data centres to be built.

Do I ever use it?

Code

If there’s a bit of custom code I need for a site, and I’m having trouble with it, I first just search the classic internet (heard of it?) to see if anyone has posted a solution. If I really can’t find anything, I will use a chatbot to figure it out.

This works is because I can see if it works. I know exactly what I’m asking for, how to add it to the site and can tell whether it’s doing the thing I want it to do. It’s obvious straight away if it’s the right answer.

If I got it to give me medical advice, I couldn’t check it was accurate because I’m not a doctor. I couldn’t check a building plan because I’m not an architect. The only reliable way to use AI is to speed up something you already do. Not to produce a facsimile of something you couldn’t.

Content

I’ve experimented with getting a chatbot to plan out or do a first draft of a piece of content for my own business. But it’s always pretty dog shit and just spurs me on to just get on with it and write it myself: something I was clearly procrastinating over! Not worth the electricity and water, I’d say.

Other stuff

Sometimes if I need to extract text from an image it’s useful and speedy for that.

What don’t I use it for?

Everything else.

Obviously I would never us AI to build a whole website. They’re shit.

Clients and AI

Briefs

Please don’t send me an AI-written brief. See above about not using it to do things you can’t do yourself. If you’ve never written a brief for a website, no worries. Let’s have an actual conversation about your business and your goals and we can work out together what you need. I can give you the advice you’re paying me to give! Groundbreaking! And it won’t be a 40 page document that neither of us has bothered to read.

Branding

Don’t use AI to do your logo or branding. The way things stand/are going, you legally won’t own or be able to copyright it. Also it will probably be awful. And by definition, derivative of loads of other stuff. I know loads of great branding designers, with different price points. We’ve got this.

Copy

I’d rather not use AI-generated content on your site. It simply won’t be as good as properly-written stuff. Which will have a knock-on effect on your conversions and sales and your customers’ trust. I do understand that budgets are tight. I know a lot of copywriters and not all of them are really expensive. I even write copy myself, on some projects. We can be strategic and find a way to make it work. I’ve edited AI content in the past, but it’s not ideal. Let’s at least talk through the options first.

Images

Best case scenario: you have your own photos of your lovely face and/or your business/product in action or your charming customers.

Medium case scenario: we use some stock images, choosing the ones that are the least cringe.

Fun case scenario: we commission some cool illustrations.

Never case scenario: fugly, fugly, AI-generated images.

Feedback

When I show you my work, I want to hear what you think about it, how it represents your business and how it meets your goals. Don’t ask Claude or some other bozo for their input. They don’t know what they’re talking about (because they’re not a ‘they’ or actually ‘talking’).

Also, chatbots will always give you something that needs changing. Even if you previously changed the things it told you to. It’s not a good use of our time.

Calls

I don’t have a problem with AI transcriptions and summaries of calls if it helps you remember/process what we talked about and helps us move the project forward.

Utter madness

I met someone at a networking event and every single testimonial on his site was a rap written by AI. Yes, a rap. I know. His answer when I questioned it: “no one uses real reviews”. I backed away as quickly as I could.

We won’t be doing that on your site.

Security

I will never put you or your business’ private or personal data anywhere near an AI tool.

Changes

In the future I may edit this policy. All policies should be regularly revisited. But I hope I won’t do any dramatic u-turns. The planet can’t take it.

Questions?

Any questions or comments, you can email hello@mollygetsitdone.com.