We use AI.We will alwaystell you where.
Most studios either hide their use of AI or quietly let you assume a human did everything. We do neither. We love this technology, we use it every day, and we label it.
We are not embarrassed about it
We use AI. Daily, deliberately, and across most of what we make. We are not going to perform the fashionable anxiety about it, and we are not going to pretend a tool that makes good people faster is a threat to craft.
The studio was founded by people who like technology. Refusing to use the most capable instruments available, and then charging a client more for the privilege of our slowness, would be a strange way to run a business that stakes its entire fee on the quality of the result.
The one rule we do not break
We never present AI-generated imagery, copy or code as though it were made by a human hand alone. Not to you, not to a jury, not in a case study, not in a pitch.
That is the whole policy. Everything else is detail. The dishonesty was never the machine — it is the silence about the machine, and the invoice that quietly prices a generated asset as bespoke illustration.
Where it genuinely helps
Scaffolding and refactoring code, migrating content between formats, generating test data, interrogating our own accessibility and performance output for things we have missed, and producing the twentieth variation of a layout in the time it used to take to produce the second.
We also use it adversarially: models are very good at arguing against a concept before a client ever sees it, and a sound criticism is worth having regardless of where it came from.
Used this way it does not replace judgement. It buys us more hours to spend on judgement, which is the part you are actually paying for.
Where a person still decides
Concept, typographic system, motion, hierarchy, tone of voice, and the decision that something is not good enough yet — these are made by a person here, and that person can defend every one of them line by line in a room.
A jury gives an award to a studio, not to a tool. We will never submit work we could not explain, and we will never ship a page whose copy reads as though nobody meant it.
Your data and your work
Your brief, your content, your commercial information and your unreleased designs are never used as training data. Where we use AI tooling on a project, it runs under terms that prohibit training on inputs, and confidential material never goes into public consumer tools.
If you would prefer a different balance on your project — more AI, less, or none at all — tell us at kick-off and we will write it into the contract. It changes nothing about the guarantee.
Disclosure to juries and to you
Where an award jury asks how a submission was made, we answer fully, including the parts that are unfashionable to admit. A win obtained by misrepresenting the process is worth less than an honest loss, and under our own wager it would also be a fraud against our client.
On request, we will give you a written account of exactly which tools touched your project and what they did. Nobody has to ask twice.
Accountability does not transfer
We remain fully responsible for everything we deliver. If something we made is wrong, derivative or broken, that is our failure and our cost to fix. “The model produced it” is not a defence we will ever offer you, a jury, or a court.
The technology moves faster than the documentation of it. We review this page at least every six months and update it whenever our practice changes, rather than letting it quietly drift out of date.
If you think we have the balance wrong, we would genuinely like to hear the argument. brief@awardorfree.com. This policy is governed by the laws of England and Wales.