It’s undeniable that we’re living in a rapidly changing professional landscape, especially in the creative industry. The emergence of generative artificial intelligence brings a host of excitement, fear, and ultimately change.
As a B Corp, we feel we have a responsibility to be candid and ethical in our use of AI. Our values stem from transparency in everything we do; honesty creates trust, and trust creates good work.
In that spirit, here’s our vision for AI – what we’re currently using it for, where we feel it might be heading, and what the future of design itself might look like.
We use AI to enhance our work, never to cut corners.
And here at SF at least, we can promise that it will never replace the foundational principles of human curiosity, connection, and creativity upon which our business was built.
Creative work is an intrinsically human business.
Artificial intelligence has no place as a shortcut for thinking. As such, we don’t use AI for strategic thinking, creative instinct, taste, and judgement – we believe inspiration is best born away from the screen, not from it.
If the ultimate aim of any form of art is to appeal to the human mind, what could do that better than the human mind itself?
…But that doesn’t mean we have to leave AI behind.
In many ways, it actually removes obstacles to creativity. We’ve found that:
- Artificial intelligence can be fantastic at automating manual processes, saving us time and giving our clients more bang for their buck;
- Running our proposals, job adverts, and the occasional important email through a bias-checker makes sure we’re always communicating as clearly and as inclusively as we can;
- Certain AI models are particularly adept at research, helping us get to the same place faster and, importantly, more comprehensively;
- Alternative learner types find digesting briefs as AI-enhanced interactive podcasts can support their creativity.
‘Use AI to clear the clutter, test options, or get unstuck, but keep the heavy lifting – the strategic calls, the tone, the taste – firmly human. It’s a bit like using a calculator. Great for speed, useless if you never learned how to add.’
Oli Garnett, Creative Director
Ultimately, these are new tools, just like anything else – and while they’re proving immensely helpful, they still need an experienced hand to make sure the output is right.
Always minimising our impact.
We’re verified green hosting providers at the Green Web Foundation, and have taken part in their Digital Carbon Estimation training to make sure our decisions are always informed, not naive. Each year, we offset our carbon use by partnering with Ripple Africa and are continuing to lower our footprint across everything we do. That’s why we’re concerned about the environmental impact of AI. Inevitably, training and running models uses energy, water and hardware. As a B-Corp, we’re all too aware of this, and so we’re focusing on what we can mitigate within the studio.
Our ongoing standardisation process includes creating a bank of knowledge and team-wide ‘AI agents’ to keep prompts as lean as possible. We’re also looking into designing workflows with impact in mind, but we enthusiastically welcome any thoughts from fellow agencies on minimising the environmental impact of AI when designing.
We’re actively looking into working with the best providers who commit to renewable energy and are transparent about efficiency. So far, this has been by far the most difficult aspect of our adoption of AI, as total transparency in tech is few and far between. We, as consumers, must push for better standards and open reporting, so that the industry as a whole can be held accountable.
New models move quicker than ever before, and the landscape is a shifting one. We’re committed to monitoring the wider impact that AI might have, prioritising using more ethical models, actively training them on our own work, and moulding it into an extension of our team.
Always staying vigilant.
Unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence isn’t totally intelligent after all. It can only ‘think’ insofar as humans can, forcing users to run the real risk of plagiarism, copyright infringement, stolen work, and biased training data.
Generative AI is, by definition, limited only to the information it receives. It’s vital that we fact check, consciously use diverse references, and reverse search in order to ensure an ethical output.
We’re adapting to AI in the studio.
We’ve identified several early challenges in our adoption of AI, including (but certainly not limited to) inconsistent tool usage across the team, varying levels of internal and client confidence in AI, and the ever-pressing need to ensure our creative integrity and human voice remain central.
As a result, we’re looking to standardise our AI tools, create shared libraries, and automate admin in order to support our creative. We’ve already collated our team’s use of AI in our recent internal workshop; we’re following up by creating an internal strategy that will support our future positioning and transparency.
The ultimate aim is to use this knowledge to create an AI playbook to be housed on our internal hub alongside this statement, outlining how we use AI across the business, which tools are approved, and our ethical principles. We want our transparency both to aid our team in their adoption of AI, and to educate our clients on our use of it.
AI is here to stay, people always come first.
The two things don’t need to be mutually exclusive; they can – and should – exist symbiotically. With this new reality comes opportunity: the democratisation of AI tools will only make good professional creatives more valuable than ever, because creativity isn’t just about output, it’s also about instinct and human curiosity.
So, is there room for robots? We don’t have all the answers, but we do know that creatives must work collaboratively to ensure the future of the industry, invest in its development, and share our learnings and challenges together.
We must use AI responsibly. We can’t lose our autonomy. We can’t lose our humanity. And we certainly can’t lose the craft. Where would any of us be without it?
[This statement was written without the use of AI]