The Yarn Queen: AI Policy

We love knitting, crochet, weaving, spinning, felting and all forms of fibre craft! Not to mention embroidery, sewing, paper craft, painting, beading and many other forms of handcraft. We stand for people making things, human creativity, and slow crafting.

In an increasingly busy, online world we also know handcrafts like crochet and knitting can be a welcome escape from doomscrolling. It’s becoming more popular for its analog nature, something we welcome and revel in ourselves.

None of this aligns with the values of AI. We want to see people making things, turning ideas into objects or art, not AI.

While we’re seeing it start to take over platforms we love: Pinterest, social media, email, we know it’s important we draw our line in the sand on what our AI tolerance is. Which to clarify, is low. Where we can avoid AI we are actively doing so.

Images

We don’t use any generative AI to create images for our products, website, or other online presence like social media.

We do use images provided by our suppliers, from stock image libraries, and from other online sources (such as designer-created photos used in pattern round-ups). Where we use third-party images, we can not guarantee that these are not AI edited in some way although we will not use fully generated images if we spot them.

Many traditional photo editing tools have been replaced by AI tools, sometimes without the user even being aware. For example, removing the background for a clearcut photo has been around for a long time, but many photo editors use an AI engine for this now. We don’t know what editing techniques suppliers or third parties are using on their images. For image libraries, these used to be solely the realm of real photos, or real photos manipulated with fancy editing techniques, but not include images that are fully generative AI, or are manipulated with AI. We use libraries infrequently and are doing our best to avoid any that look like generative AI, but we can’t guarantee that no AI images or AI-edited images

Products

You can be absolutely sure that we will never sell AI generated patterns. Our patterns are created by reliable designers and suppliers and pattern testers.
All our books are from reputable publishers and are not AI written.

We can’t eliminate the possibility that some pattern designers, book authors, or publishers are using AI for editing, ideas, or other inputs into their work. But the item you get will be reliable and been through the hands of many real people.

Copy and Content

We don’t use AI to write our copy, our blog posts, our social media posts, our newsletters, our email replies to you, or anything else you will read by us anywhere. Every word is written by Ruth, Joy, or a skilled real person we pay proper rates to for their copy and content writing skills.

Enough said. You deserve to hear our real thoughts and we don’t want a machine to think or write for us.

Admin and Management

We do not use any form of AI chatbot or tool to do any of our tasks for us: marketing ideas, social media caption ideas, or any of the other things that all the business coaches out there reckon we should be doing
Where possible, we turn off or don’t use AI tools that are forcibly integrated into tools we do use (such as accounting software, email, etc.)
We DO need to use AI to understand how we, as a business, are appearing in AI searches. We are competing in a world where more and more people are using AI answers on Google or even AI chatbots to search for products or businesses. Therefore to be found in search results, and to reach customers and stay alive as a business, we need to ensure that our product pages are found by the AI bots crawling the internet so they are delivered in AI search results, and we need to check on the success of that. We hate it. Thanks techbros!

Despite our efforts it is growing increasingly difficult to avoid AI completely as a number of tools that previously relied on algorithms and human programming are now being powered by AI instead, such as spell checks. It’s also being built into software without anyway to elect out of AI features. But we will avoid is as best we can, and we will never ask Claude for “trends in knitting” or ask Gemini to write an email for us!

Why we are AI free

There are many reasons why we don’t like AI. Here are just some of them:

AI is environmentally destructive. It uses massive amounts of electricity and water, often at the cost of neighbouring communities. Given the climate crisis and our own preferences for sustainability, there is no way to reconcile this with frivolous AI usage.

Using AI has been shown to reduce people’s inherent cognitive abilities. We are 45 and 65 years old, and we don’t need anything to affect our cognition any more than menopause and aging already are.

AI is frequently wrong. It gives bad advice, mixes up facts, or just makes stuff up. (Click here for a not-safe-for-work but hilarious yarn-based example – but be warned!) We would rather be informed by sources we trust.

AI models are trained by being fed masses of text or images that were created by people. Those people are not paid for their work to be fed to the models, and we don’t want to use models that were built on stolen labour. Handmade and craft are pivotal to what we do, recognising and understanding the effort that people put into their work is part of that.

AI scams are rife in the knitting and crochet communities, and getting worse. AI generated images, or AI modified stolen images, are being used to sell incomprehensible AI generated patterns. Entire gibberish AI books are being sold on Amazon as self-published books. Just, ugh.

Did you know there is an entire podcast that is written, recorded, and published by AI with no human input into the content, about knitting, and it is all rubbish? Kate Davies wrote about this frustration, featuring this horrifying paragraph:

Inception Point AI, on the other hand, is a slop factory employing just 8 people which, according to Anne, publishes “about 3,000 podcast episodes per week, hosted by AI personalities.” Anne tells Jamie that, to date, Inception Point AI’s podcasts have accumulated “12 million lifetime downloads. And we’re averaging about 750,000 downloads a month.” Stunned by these extraordinary figures, Jamie asks Anne about the editorial oversight of the content which she produces. Does she, or any of her colleagues, actually listen to any of these 3000 weekly episodes? With only 8 employees, who on earth has time to check the accuracy or quality of these podcasts? The answer is, of course, that no one checks or edits the podcast content– but, Anne tells Jamie blithely, this really doesn’t matter because the topics under discussion are so low stakes: “most of our content sits squarely in topics that aren’t life or death necessarily. So gardening, for example, knitting, cooking, these things we can afford to be wrong. And it’s not necessarily the end of the world.”

We want no part of supporting this.

We know that there are a lot of reasons why people and businesses do use AI, and those who do are still welcome here! But we are doing everything we can to remain human driven and AI free.

If you spot anything on our site or in our content that we have shared from a third party that you think is AI generated, please let us know. It is getting hard to spot!

But think of all the good AI does!

Absolutely! It is advanced pattern recognition based on incredible technology and clever science. It should be used where it matters: health and medicine (such as developing early detection techniques), or supporting complex sciences such as climate modelling or electric grid balancing, etc. (and the creators of the data it is trained on compensated for their work). But the result has to be worth the cost, and making it easier to run our business is not.