Our AI Usage Policy

We hear a lot of talk these days about "the age of AI." We thought it would be worth laying out what we do and don't use AI for in our business - out of respect for both you and us.

We do use AI for

1. Generating image backgrounds.

This is where most of our AI usage is at. With some decent lighting and AI, we are able to turn a mess of a workshop photo like this:

into a sign-focused product photo like this:

To make that change, we uploaded the first photo into Shopify, used their "generate" tool, and prompted it to "Change the background to a tree-lined downtown sidewalk with passerby and storefronts with dynamic reflections in sun dappled windows."

2. Small coding changes to our website

Sometimes, we want to add a custom section to our website that has a flippy-over card, or is a certain style of testimonial block, or some other such thing. We will feed our prompt into the Shopify CoPilot AI tool and let it build us a section for those.

We do not use AI for

1. Graphic design work. 

No further explanation needed.

2. Core product imagery. 

We will feed a product photo into AI to get a more aesthetic background. We won't let AI generate an image of the product itself. 

If you run into any questions about how we use AI tools, or want to get any clarification on anything, feel free to reach out directly to our comms gal, Jess, at jess@sidewalkmonkey.com.