Mr. Blue Sky & the Eth­i­cal Light Orchestra

Our point exactly.

Uncle Ben made us do it

Change implies pos­si­bil­i­ties, and pos­si­bil­i­ties are good. It’s good to have an oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn about what we do, about how we do it, and to find ways of doing it not just faster, but more impor­tant­ly, bet­ter. It’s good to have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to exer­cise our judg­ment, make the deci­sions, run the risks and call the shots. A great pow­er. You know what comes with that.

You’re preach­ing to the choir, Uncle!

There are sev­er­al con­cerns about the use of AI in our indus­try, rang­ing from copy­right infringe­ment and pla­gia­rism, to sim­u­la­tion and data man­age­ment, among many, many others.

Ethics is ulti­mate­ly, about lim­its, the lines you draw to make sure you oper­ate with­in the lim­its of what you deem acceptable.

We must set the bound­aries that mir­ror our prin­ci­ples. Those are for each one of us to define and defend. But we work in an indus­try where peo­ple put their mon­ey where our mouths are, so what we say mat­ters, and whether or not we can be trust­ed mat­ters too.

We deal with trust, and you build that, among oth­er things, with honesty.

Eter­nal Right­ful Own­er­ship of a Spot­less Cre­ative Work

Bear with us on this one:

Let’s say you call your favorite junk food place and order ten pounds of spicy chick­en wings. That’s the prompt.

The deliv­ery guy arrives and you pay for the food, estab­lish­ing legal own­er­ship. You tweak it with a pinch of salt, a bit of lemon, and your favorite dress­ing. In oth­er words, you fine-tune the out­put to make it feel home-cooked).

Final­ly, you eat it, in all its deli­cious­ly greasy glory.

You saved a few hours of cook­ing, lit­er­al­ly put food on the table for your fam­i­ly, and had a great din­ner. Con­grats. It was objec­tive­ly a good and use­ful idea.

The catch?

The Pre­tenders 🎭

Here’s where it gets tricky:

• Would you call your­self a chef?
• Would you tell your fam­i­ly that you made it?
• Would you resell it as your work?
• And would you feel proud about it?

Gen­er­a­tive AIs are to cre­ativ­i­ty what fast food is to your grand­ma’s favorite recipe, that you can still smell in the back of your brain and makes you feel like you’re ten years old again. These are infe­ri­or sim­u­la­tions using some­one else’s ​“inspi­ra­tion” (dataset) to give you a reheat­ed, hal­lu­ci­nat­ed, and inac­cu­rate lorem ipsum that should not be regard­ed with much respect, let alone pride. Their thing is not creativity.

We accept the fact that Every­thing is a remix. And yet there’s an uncan­ny feel­ing we can’t shake off. Author­ship is some­thing else. Mar­ket­ing is some­thing else. This is just bull­shit.

Per­haps we’re naïve, but we believe we should own our truth and busi­ness cul­ture, and then fig­ure out how far we’re will­ing to go on the road to effi­cien­cy with­out los­ing our­selves and becom­ing just anoth­er copy of a copy of a copy.

Don’t get me wrong 🔑

This is not a Lud­dite man­i­fest. We’re look­ing kind of daz­zled. We’re crazy about the tool and try­ing to under­stand its true poten­tial. It’s fan­tas­tic. And it’s not going away. But we can’t shy away from the inher­ent challenges.

“New jobs will be cre­at­ed” is not a nar­ra­tive strong enough to jus­ti­fy replac­ing entire teams.

“We can do six months of social posts” is not a nar­ra­tive that gives us per­mis­sion to bloat social net­works with arti­fi­cial, mean­ing­less con­tent that sounds like us.

Embrace unstop­pable change, but set bound­aries and demand accountability.

A pro­posed approach: Set the rules. Make them trans­par­ent. Ques­tion the rules. Iter­ate. Stick to principles.

While we fig­ure out what these changes mean and wait for peo­ple in pow­er to catch up with this cen­tu­ry’s zeit­geist, we can bear our respon­si­bil­i­ty and pub­licly ask to be held accountable.

Define your cri­te­ria, set your lim­its and make them crys­tal clear for your cus­tomers, part­ners, and providers.

This ​“AI Code of Con­duct” can take many forms. Here’s what we’re doing at Take­FortyT­wo:

When using one of these mar­velous tools, ask yourself:

• Are you automat­ing tedious tasks? Or replac­ing someone?
• Is the result bet­ter than doing it the good old-fash­ioned way?
• Who are you help­ing? Clients, staff, your­self, the world?
• Do you have the resources (time, bud­get) to keep peo­ple in charge of deliv­er­ing creativity?
• Are you opti­miz­ing some­thing that does­n’t need it?

Fig­ure out the ​“why” behind it.

Have a good rea­son to use Gen­er­a­tive AI. Or two.

If you’re incor­po­rat­ing AI into your dai­ly process­es for the sake of tech­nol­o­gy alone, please recon­sid­er. Tech is only a medi­um and nev­er an end.

If it’s to achieve more with less time and effort, think care­ful­ly about who that ben­e­fits, and be trans­par­ent about it. The race to obses­sive effi­cien­cy does not gen­er­al­ly ben­e­fit cre­ativ­i­ty, explo­ration or innovation.

If it’s because the result­ing work real­ly improves all the oth­er very human stuff you do, make it work (and remain trans­par­ent about the fact that you did­n’t cook the chicken).

If it will impact oth­er peo­ple’s lives neg­a­tive­ly, con­sid­er if there’s any oth­er way.

If it’s because ​“Every­body’s doing it so why can’t we” remind your­self that fol­low­ing trends is a per­son­al choice, and there’s no real val­ue in being an ear­ly adopter of anything.

Tell your cus­tomers when some­thing was built with AI. Arti­cles, images, videos, descrip­tions, cus­tomer sup­port, order pro­cess­ing, live chat, prod­uct descrip­tions, search sug­ges­tions, you name it. Be open about the tools you use, why, and how.

And don’t take it way too seri­ous­ly. We might be look­ing at the ear­ly days of the great­est tech­nol­o­gy break­through, or not at all. Nobody knows. When in doubt, check your instincts and sum­mon the Uncle Ben that lives in your heart.

Smarter peo­ple than us say 💭

• Time to review our absurd obses­sion with effi­cien­cy. Rory is always right.
• Out­bound growth hack­ers were a pain in the ass before AI. Now they’re unleashed. We’ll just stop pay­ing atten­tion. Blair and David are always right.
• If you’re on Team Human or an aspir­ing Luditte, remem­ber that moral high-ground cam­paigns weren’t suc­cess­ful in the past. A dif­fer­ent con­ver­sa­tion is needed.
• Rory Suther­land again (sor­ry not sor­ry, the man is good) on cher­ish­ing irra­tional­i­ty.
• If you haven’t picked a side yet, know that you’re not the only one. There are many big, tough ques­tions under­neath a deceiv­ing­ly sim­ple dis­cus­sion on tech­nol­o­gy adop­tion. Read Mat­tin’s essay here.

Next stop: Mak­ing things work

Phew. Got that one out of our chests. Now let’s move on to the final chap­ter: How to imple­ment this (in what we think is) the right way. A quick col­lec­tion of how we’re try­ing to embrace change, plus sources for fur­ther read­ing and guid­ance from our favorite smartest and expertest peo­ple in the multiverse.

Chap­ter III: Build­ing the plan as we wing it

So long, and thanks for all the fish.