f*this and AI

This is a conversation we've been meaning to have for a while.

And we're pleased to advise that we do not use any AI at all in design.

We do most of the designing ourselves, supplemented by elements (mostly fonts, sometimes graphics/illustrations) that are purchased with a licence to use commercially. We use a few different market places for this, each allows the artist/designer to set their price. We do not purchase AI slop.

Photos

We also don't use AI generated photos. All our garment flat lay pics are AS Colour-supplied and the quickest way we've found to use them is in Canva. We add our desgins to the garments and load them up to our site.

Photos with people in them include some pics of friends and family, but are mostly produced via www.placeit.com. Place it doesn't use true AI and I'd be very surprised if you can't pic them on the site, it's pretty ordinary quality but it's cheap and easy and good enough.

Website admin

If you have a sharp eye, you'll notice there was a qualifier up there. When it comes to managing this shopify store, we do use AI. Until recently we only used the inbuilt AI assistant to ask how to do things. However there's now a shopify connector to Claude and it is (for us inexperienced folk) a game changer. 

Early on in the life of f*this we purchased a shopify "theme" (basically an out of the box shop) and we had to take what it offered. If something about it didn't work for f*this, we had to just suck it up. Now we can ask Claude to look at the shop and analyse why something is the way it is and if we could do it differently. Often it can make the changes too.

f*this barely makes enough money to cover the cost of running it (we DO make a donation of minimum $5 per purchase of tee, sweat or tote), hiring specialised human help is well beyond our means. We've made a decision that we can only continue by embracing AI as ethically as possible.

We do realise that's an oxymoron, at least at the moment. So we've made a decision to pay a subscription and learn. To take the time to understand how to use it as efficiently as possible by training it to understand our preferences. This means that new queries don't have to reprocess information it's already learned about f*this. We're selective about what we use it to do and we're doing as much as we can to keep up with the commentary out in the world about how people can use it. That means you're not always starting from scratch - saving false starts and processing time.

It's not a perfect answer.