AI-free, human-generated

It’s encouraging to see folks declaring their work AI-free or human-generated, in some form or another.

Jared White has pledged that everything his web design studio creates will be 100% AI-free going forward:

Our pledge to you in 2024 and beyond: 100% AI-free productions. All the solutions we provide are of the finest human-grade quality. We’re not afraid of progress! But we’re not buying the bullshit. Read more about our AI Ethical Framework we’ve laid out which presents the minimum threshold required for us to evaluate any “generative AI” toolchain.

Venkatram has taken another approach, by adding the following statement to the footer of his website:

Climate friendly and completely AI-free.

Annie Sturdivant has done something similar, also adding a statement in the footer of her website:

Handcrafted by a human.

Not by AI takes this idea a step further by offering a “produced by a human” badge that you can add to your work. You’ll qualify as long as your work isn‘t generated by AI or at least 90% of it is created by humans.

“Not By AI badges are created to encourage more humans to produce original content and help users identify human-generated content.”

According the the Not by AI website, this is important because:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is trained using human-created content. If humans stop producing new content and rely solely on AI, online content across the world may become repetitive and stagnant.

Makes sense. Though you may argue that AI will simply augment human creativity – just like any other creative tool – rather than stagnate it. I suppose that depends on the degree to which we embrace it.

What you can’t argue with is the detrimental impact that AI is having on the environment. Powering AI server farms and training AI data models consumes a sickening amount of energy, with studies warning that the AI industry could consume as much energy as a country the size of the Netherlands by 2027.

There’s also the ethical implications of AI companies exploiting ghost workers to moderate content. The legal implications of stealing copywrited material to train AI models. And the opportunity cost of loosing your job to AI. The list goes on.

For these reasons, I’m right behind this “AI-free” idea and what it stands for.

I like moving slowly, doing difficult things that take time and effort. There’s no better feeling than using your fallible head and hands to create original work. Ultimately, it’s rewarding. Work to be proud of.

Can the same be said of the stuff generative AI tools spit out for you in a matter of seconds? Probabaly not.

Anyway, I hope to see this “AI-free” trend continue to grow. I’ll return to this post to document more examples, as and when I find them.

27th Aug 24: Piccalilli commits to being an AI-free publication:

We maintain that quality by focusing on web standards technology and a guaranteed commitment that we will never publish content written by large language models or other flavours of “AI”.