As a small family-owned business in a niche built upon friendship, family and community, we understand the importance of maintaining an honest and upfront relationship with our customers.
So we’re just going to say it here for all to see: yes, we use AI. We’ve made the decision to be up front about it rather than trying to hide the fact, so we created this page, hosted on our main site, to explain exactly how and why we use these tools.
The purpose of this page isn’t to try and win you over. If AI-generated content is a deal breaker for you, we’d rather have you know that before you spend any money with us.
Despite this, there are absolutely real people behind this brand, who hold a strong passion for board games and the community gamers who play them. As members of this community ourselves, we have seen the backlash against AI use in games. We understand concerns about the de-humanization of art. We understand that AI is not for everyone. We want to respect your choice, and will use this page to ensure that our stance on it is clear.
Here are some detailed descriptions of exactly how we use AI to run our company.
Writing
The writing you see here on the site is written by us. The content you find on our blog, the Board Gamers Field Guide, is written by a human, with actual tales of our trips and conventions, and true stories from experience around the table. Our recommendations come from the heart. Facts about garment care, quality and sourcing are accurate to the best of our knowledge, based on information provided from the manufacturer.
How we use AI: We check our articles with AI prior to posting to check for factual errors in our writing, spell checking, and to verify that we said what we think we said. It catches grammatical mistakes for us, suggests readability improvements when we weren’t clear and ensures that we’re not misleading you. It has also made some suggestions for article topics.
We’ve also utilized standardized templates for some of the more legal-sounding policies you see linked in our footer, though our shipping and returns policy – the ones more applicable to our day-to-day business practices – are our own.
AI Images
For a business of our size, it is simply not feasible for us to hire professional models and host photo shoots to create the images you see here for our entire product catalog. We believe strongly in privacy, so much so that we only use social media as a tool because we need to, which is why you will be hard pressed to find pictures of us or our children on our own site.
And honestly, our founder lacks even the most basic camera skills.
How we use AI: The majority of the lifestyle images you see on our blog of models wearing our t-shirt designs are created using generative AI. They are illustrative, rather than documentary. Most of our blog articles also contain AI generated images, with some important distinctions. When citing other businesses, we have made every attempt to source original photos from their owners and credited them where appropriate. We have also taken photos of items we own when doing our own reviews or recommendations, including our actual game collection and products we have featured.
While our models may not be real humans, a real human is vetting this process. Care has been taken to ensure that colors of the print and fabric are photorealistic, shirt designs are depicted accurately, and that we are not misrepresenting other businesses or infringing on intellectual property owned by others.
Shirt Designs
Concepts, phrases, art direction and selection of specific t-shirt designs are done by humans, as are some of the designs you see on this site, using graphic design tools.
How we use AI: We use AI to take the majority of our concepts and ideas and make them into a cohesive design. That design is manually checked for accuracy and it’s fit into the overall collection prior to publishing it as a real product.
You can read our How We Design page to learn more about the specifics of what makes our shirts unique.
Why We’re Telling You
Frankly, the existence of this page does more harm than good to the bottom line of our business. We’ll lose customers, promotional opportunities, and sponsorships because of it. And we know that it doesn’t need to exist.
Our brand philosophy is about building a relationship with you. We’d rather have an honest relationship with our community – even knowing that many people will disagree – than leave our customers doubting our veracity.
You don’t have to share our view of these tools.
And we’re not going to try to evangelize them either.
But before you choose to support our business, we believe you should know who you’re dealing with, and we find that open and honest communication is the best policy.
