Over the past year and a half, artificial intelligence has been the focal point of nearly every conversation about the future of labor. Corporations and startups are spending billions of dollars on AI as people project their hopes and fears onto it, setting it up as a proxy for attitudes towards culture, capitalism, and technology. With all the noise, it’s been difficult for many in the creative space to understand the real-world impact of these new innovations on our work and lives. Third Bridge Creative is engaging with AI in the hopes of transforming the tool sets we provide to our workforce and creating a new line of services and products that we offer to our clients. We are approaching AI in a way that is ethical and fair to our contributors and community, improves our work, and helps us better articulate our perspectives on culture.
As we begin this journey, we’ve spent time talking with different individuals inside and outside our company to understand how we fit into this landscape, and how we can do so in a way that is fair and transparent to our community, collaborators, and clients. Below are the basic principles that we will adhere to as we continue to navigate this space.
Our north star will always be figuring out how these new technologies improve the work of our creatives, not replace them.
We believe that at its root, culture is a fundamentally human endeavor. This is true of the people who create it, and equally true of those who shape and engage with the conversation around it. Regardless of how we use AI to help us execute our work, critical creative decisions will always be made by humans. This will be true of not only our final products, but also inform how we use the technology in our work itself: which data sets we identify and curate, how we structure our prompts, and the types of software and tools we use.
We’ll have to think and work differently by privileging innovation and experimentation.
The landscape for creatives has changed many times since the advent of the World Wide Web over thirty years ago. Each time, creative practitioners adapted and learned new ways to use their knowledge and skills to make a living from their craft. We are currently in one of these transitional periods. In order to survive and grow – both as a business and as individual creatives – we’ll have to change the way we work. This will require us to try new things. We’ll have to expend resources, both in terms of monetary investments and time. We’ll place smart bets, but it’s inevitable that while some of our efforts will yield valuable results, others won’t. What’s important is that we try out new ideas and learn from them.
Used properly, artificial intelligence can enhance our work.
At its core, AI is a mechanism that powers a new suite of tools. There are many ways that we could use it help us execute our work on a technical level: performing administrative, rote tasks such as data entry; providing input into strictly non-creative tasks such as language translation or quality assurance; aiding in the creative process by developing first drafts of articles, blurbs, or playlists, or contrasting different stylistic approaches; or enhancing the quality or the accuracy of the data that we use to inform our decisions around curation or assignment allocation.
There are also gaps in AI's execution that can't be filled by a machine.
The heart of our work engages with culture and art – through listening, watching, and taking in information, we interpret these signals based on our values and perspective, and synthesize these ideas using technical skills that we’ve honed over many years. AI is good at ingesting and synthesizing data, but the interpretative and critical thinking that informs our decisions is essential to our processes and the quality of our work, and allows us to see and work against any biases that AI algorithms might be pulling from. It also leaves space for original thought that pushes the culture forward.
Our work and our ideas have value, and we will provide attribution and compensation for them.
Conversations around culture are collaborative and iterative. Threads overlap and ideas build off one another, but our knowledge and understanding of culture is based on the labor of specific individuals – those who have written and created reviews, features, videos, Wikipedia entries, blogs, and social posts on the internet for the past thirty years. As we puzzle through how to use these tools, we’ll seek to acknowledge that labor, and use tools, build models, and develop products that fairly compensate these individuals.
We will use artificial intelligence in a transparent manner with both our contributors and our clients.
We will let our community – employees, contributors and clients – know how we are using this technology, and how it impacts our work. We will never use any contributor’s work in learning language models without their knowledge and consent. We will never use AI to develop an end-product without explicitly informing our client.
We want to continue to have these important conversations within our community. If you have thoughts, reservations, or want to bring up other considerations in regards to how we might best approach AI, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us directly: hello@thirdbridgecreative.com
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