Human-Centric AI: Plank’s Approach to AI in Web Design and Development

In May, we hosted most of our team in person for our annual retreat called Plank Appreciation Week (PAW for short), and one of the key topics we discussed in a roundtable chat was our approach to using Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) tools and Large Language Models (LLMs). While there are a variety of views on AI that fall on a broad spectrum, we need not just discuss the adoption of different tools and approaches in our work, but take a step back and establish a philosophical intention behind how to use these tools responsibly ourselves and with our clients.

What is Human Centric AI?

Our approach to LLM tools is what we call human-centric AI, which focuses on people over technology. Our goal is to encourage using AI to enhance someone’s abilities, not replace them. We want to make their work more rewarding and remove the tedium of some types of work. We aim to enhance the well-being of our team by helping them grow their skills, invest in learning and constantly level up what they can accomplish for themselves, our clients and our organization as a whole. Our use of AI must meet the standard we’ve set forth in our Ethical Web Collective movement and help enhance all aspects of it.

As a certified B Corp, it is also our responsibility to examine our usage of AI and how it affects our team, clients and partners. We need to have in place a governance framework and environmental commitment that aligns with our standards and organizational expectations.

The Responsibility Behind AI Use

We should use AI to assist our team to do work better, not to replace someone. It is an opportunity to free someone to do more creative work and expand their skills in new areas. Using these tools without oversight can lead to generic and uninspired writing or, worse, bug-ridden, undocumented and unoptimized code.

We also take our responsibility to use AI in useful ways with our clients seriously. We are proud that we can offer our clients a working relationship that is thoughtful, personable and unique. While we can use tools to document discussions and meetings more efficiently, we intend to let our people be more present and engaged. It also allowed us to be more creative in the ways that we can build AI tools into our website projects in ways that enhance the user experience for all.

Building Thoughtful AI Experiences for Clients

In a recent project with The Canadian Encyclopedia, we were challenged with the opportunity to explore how to implement Gen AI into their Content Management System (CMS) to inspire their editorial team to prioritize content updates based on the timeliness of some of their articles, based on the recent news. They recognized the need to use AI as an opportunity to keep more active profiles up to date and active. The goal was to give them AI tools to use primary sources as an effective way to monitor what content should be updated, thereby making their jobs a little bit easier.

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The Risks We Actively Mitigate

We also recognize that we can use AI in harmful ways, and it’s our responsibility to consider from a technical, content and security perspective that we must audit everything we ask AI to assist us with. We want to be sure that our code is bug-free, well optimized and securely handles all information. We also realize that many systems are trained on copyrighted materials and public data that may contain harmful or incorrect information. It’s our responsibility to stand behind anything we produce and audit the sources that helped in its creation.

Until recently, we have trusted our team to use AI tools in a way that aligns with what they think is best and how it will be helpful to their day-to-day work. As we move forward, our aim is to offer them guidelines on how they can use different types of technology. We want to let them know which options we think will make them the most productive, consider our content and code’s legal and copyright requirements, and ensure that we never expose ourselves, our clients or our community to legal risk.

Environmental Impact of AI

Finally, with AI queries having an environmental impact of anywhere from three to five times the impact per request over traditional search, we need to start discovering a way to measure our daily impact. Without access to the full environmental impact of training each model on top of the queries, we are currently in a research stage to figure out how to report on our usage. For now, we are not shying away from AI tools since, if they make our developers 25% more productive as they report anecdotally, our efficiency may affect our environmental impact in other areas.

Our Commitment: People First

Unlike some other company leaders who are salivating at the chance to replace their workforce with AI to increase their profits, we want to use it responsibly to help our existing team do better work, deliver better results for our clients and deepen our partnerships. We want to offer guidelines and tools that allow us to become better designers, developers and leaders.

Our goal is to create an environment where our human-centric approach to using AI focuses on improving our highly custom approach to website and web application development. AI can be used to augment all of our capabilities and improve our work experience and work-life balance.

Ready to Talk AI With Us?

Want to learn more about how we use AI ot how we can help you thoughtfully integrate it into a project? Let’s chat!