Roasting House Coffee (@roastinghouse.mastodonapp.uk.ap.brid.gy)

Our AI policy (tl;dr: we don’t use AI) For a while I thought that the whole AI thing was over-stated and people weren’t using it quite as much as the hype would have you believe, but apparently 79% of people have used AI at work so it really is everywhere. Only 15% of small businesses are using it compared to 68% of large businesses so we small business holders are the refuseniks holding out! With all the AI hype swirling around, I decided to set out in writing what our AI policy is. It’s very simple: we don’t use AI. We write our product descriptions ourselves, we cobble together the website from WordPress, Woocommerce and a bunch of plugins ourselves, we read and reply to your emails ourselves. All 100% human, spelling mistakes and all. A big part of this is we just don’t trust the companies who are leading the way with AI, or large language models as they should be called considering there’s nothing intelligent about them. If Facebook and Google are ploughing money in to it, it’s not likely to be used for good considering their reputation. Also, as a company which tries to minimise our carbon footprint as much as we can, LLMs are just not worth the energy they consume. Our human brains are actually intelligent (especially after the first coffee of the day!) and are far more efficient. And of course there’s the theft issue. LLMs are built on the work of millions of creatives, many of whom already struggle to survive to feed AI products that will enrich people who are already the wealthiest on the planet. That’s just not on. And of course creative people thrive on coffee; if we back a product which steals their work then we’re stealing their income and therefore their ability to buy coffee. That’s just bad business. So that’s our AI policy in a nutshell. Written by a human who hasn’t had any caffeine yet today somehow so please forgive any human mistakes Source on the stats: https://www.forbes.com/uk/advisor/business/software/uk-artificial-intelligence-ai-statistics/ https://roastinghouse.co.uk/kimberley/our-ai-policy-tldr-we-dont-use-ai/