To preface, this is not intended as an attack or criticism of any particular competitor. It is purely a critique of how AI operates, its usage and highlighting the harm that can unknowingly result from it.
Want to skip straight to the pledges?
Don't forget we're running a discount code at the moment, TOOMANYBOXES will get you 15% of any in stock items on the site.
Follwing on from the last post, all of the items from our most recent delivery are currently in the building! We're still working away getting the product descriptions written so that we can put the products live.
This takes us a little while because outside of a small amount of products rushed to meet the black Friday deadline which use the generic Bandai blurb, the vast majority of our product descriptions are bespoke written based on extensive research to ensure we're giving you the best idea of what you are purchasing. They may not be perfect and we still struggle with language barriers but we try to make sure they're as complete as possible.
Which this leads on to the topic of today’s post. It has been brought to our attention that AI chatbots are seemingly aware of our little website and have been ripping off our product descriptions. In itself that might not be the worst thing if they to help drive traffic back to the site. However, that is very rarely the case as chatbots prefer to keep people confined in their own platform and will do so even more as built in advertising is added.
Where it gets especially problematic is that we find ourselves in a situation where it appears a competitor has used AI tools to write their marketing which, in a roundabout way, resulted in us helping to write their promotional material as some of the information presented is only explicitly stated on our website.
In our view this feels unreasonable, and is not something we will ever engage in! Even from the competitor's position it should give pause for thought as it could give the impression they're knowingly lifting copy from other vendors when egregious examples occur.
Anyway here are the Big Robots Rock AI pledges.
- We will never use AI to generate images for use on our site, in marketing materials or for any other reason. AI is trained on content which is often taken without permission of the original creator. On top of that the output usually ends up looking terrible because details get lost or distorted in the re-drawing process, even when it's just background removal or adding watermarks.
- We will never use AI generated text. Again, it's largely content taken without the consent of the original creator and little care is taken to ensure accuracy.
- We will wherever possible avoid AI generated code powering the website. This may prove challenging as the shop platform the site is built on seem hell bent on forcing AI tools into every aspect of the back-end system and we cannot control what the theme develop does unbeknown to us. What we can promise is that we we will continue to ignore the gen AI tools and push back against them. If code needs to exist for required functionality we will try to write it ourselves and share the code with anyone else who might need to solve the same problem.
On top of the specific justifications above, there is also the environmental and societal impact of AI usage that we want absolutely no part of! The planned growth of data centres will lead to depletion of natural resources and the pollution they will create is unsustainable. As is the behaviour of AI companies effectively strangling supply of basic tech components which impacts almost every other business to some degree and filters through into increased costs to the consumer.
