Our Statement on Generative A.I. as a Creative Business

As an important expression of our values, we do not use generative A.I. at Walnut Studiolo.

In this post, we talk about what that means, and why we're telling you.

We use technology and computers in our creative work, but not generative A.I.

Table of Contents

We Don't Use Generative AI at Walnut Studiolo Why Not A.I.? It's Bad for Creative People It's Bad for the Environment It's Spreading Disinformation It's Sowing Distrust Conclusion... Resources - Learn More You May Also Be Interested In...

Valerie and Geoffrey Franklin of Walnut Studiolo taking a selfie at sunset on the North Oregon Coast beach

The Authors

Geoff and Valerie Franklin are the husband-and-wife crafting team at Walnut Studiolo. In business since 2009, we design and make completely original modern designs in our workshop on the gorgeous North Oregon Coast. Read more about us.

We Don't Use Generative A.I. at Walnut Studiolo

We never use generative A.I. to design and fabricate products. We design and make them the old-fashioned way, with family arguments (er, “debates”), sweat and patience, dozens of prototypes, and multiple product testing sessions with friends and fans.

We never use A.I. images. We take actual photos, shot by talented professional photographers – and sometimes untalented amateur photographers (like ourselves!).

We never use A.I. to write. Although some writers may have found A.I. to be a helpful starting place, we do not. Nor do we believe the use of A.I. can be justified, even as a creative shortcut, due to its environmental impact.

We decline to use generative A.I. offered by our programs and apps, such as customer service responses or product descriptions written by A.I. Although we can’t control which programs and apps have begun to incorporate A.I. in their offerings we will reject their use whenever it’s an option.

Why Not A.I.?

But why was it necessary to create this post?

Lack of transparency is a huge issue swirling around A.I. That's one reason we're writing this today: we're being transparent. We own all our typos and we hope that you'll enjoy reading our original, creative writing, seeing our original, creative photography, and using our original, creative products.

There are four reasons why we don't use A.I. as a small creative business, and now is the time to share them.

It's Bad for Creative People

A.I. models have been trained on copyrighted content without consent nor compensation – and that content is now competing with the original creators. Some of the world’s largest content creators are suing tech companies over it.

At Etsy, A.I. is deciding what's handmade and what's not -- banning long-time sellers with no possibility of appeal.

But it begs the question, why are the bots being used for creative endeavors? As one social poster said:

Text tweet by @KarlreMarks that says, Humans doing the hard jobs on minimum wage while the robots write poetry and paint is not the future I wanted

It's Bad for the Environment

Like, really really bad. Scientists calculated that one 100-word email written by generative will use a bottle’s worth of water or electricity equivalent to 14 LED light bulbs operating for 1 hour.

Or, as one humorist put it, “By turning off your lights all day every day for a month, you conserved about 1 percent of the energy needed for AI to generate a picture of a duck wearing sunglasses. Isn’t he cute?”

The response from AI champions? Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt was just quoted as saying, "We're not going to hit the climate goals anyway … I'd rather bet on AI." We disagree.

It's Spreading Disinformation

Nobody is fact-checking generative A.I. writing. It gives the appearance of intelligent-sounding "good enough" content, while not actually being grounded in the world of human experience and reality. (Or as one researcher from Microsoft put it, A.I. is not artificial nor intelligent!)

It’s the lack of transparency that’s the real problem. Not enough people are disclosing when they're using it, so it's decreasing our trust in each other and online content in general.

If an article began with the label – Written by A.I.– would you be likely to believe everything you read?

Screenshot of a tweet by @heavenrend that shows a screenshot of a google search result suggesting adding glue to a pizza to get the cheese to stay on

It's Sowing Distrust

Saving time for some people … at the expense of others.

Quick and easy generation with little (or no) editing is creating a “sea of slop” and most people don’t even like the results!

It's becoming a big problem -- and not just for the internet. Teachers are reporting a sharp increase in students cheating using A.I. -- forcing them to use their grading time catching plagiarism with A.I. (which is itself flawed, too)!

We have personally experienced it, and we're sure we're not the only ones. Somebody sent us a piece of writing to review. Facts and claims were made in the presentation that seemed questionable, but we weren't sure if the sender researched them or not. Then we got midway through it, and there was content in the middle that was wildly off-topic and had no business being there. Their mistake was now revealed -- the sender hadn't done any work at all. They spent 5 minutes asking a computer to write it for them, then sent to the reader to review. It shifts the burden of questioning, editing, and review from the producer to the consumer.

Only real discerning humans can unclutter the sheer volume of fake text and images being produced, and it's becoming exhausting.

Demonstration of how inaccurate A.I. images are taking over search results, presented by u/MetaKnowing on Reddit.

Conclusion...

We still believe in the old-fashioned business model of our grandparents. Do an honest thing and do it well.

That's why we made this statement on A.I. Because we don't want to lose your trust. Even if it's unpopular, we think it's important to point out the downsides: