Siler Climate Consulting Generative AI Commitment
We commit to our clients and collaborators that we will not use Generative AI* tools to develop Siler Climate Consulting work products and deliverables*. This commitment to work without Generative AI stems from the shared values that guide our work at SCC and our guarantee to clients that choosing to work with SCC means you will be getting our time, experience, expertise, and care. The relationship between our values and this commitment to working without Generative AI can be summarized in four core ways:
We believe that what we deliver to our project partners is a reflection of how it is produced. Our team chooses to do climate justice planning with communities because we care deeply about who is included in processes and what that means about the material conditions that shape our lives. All elements of our work with clients is intentional because process matters when striving to produce more equitable and transformative outcomes.
We value our time and we value our partners’ time. We believe in taking the time to write and communicate with language that we chose to best reflect our understanding of the communities we serve.
We operate as a worker-owned cooperative because we want our labor to build solidarity and collectively govern profit. In practice, this means that we value critical inquiry, exploration, and engagement over efficiency, profit, and growth. We produce work at a human pace, which takes time to generate and refine but this leads us to original, emergent, and place-based ideas. We firmly believe that the time we take to consider each place and project carefully is worth it to deliver community-responsive ideas, engagements, and products.
We seek transformative climate adaptation work because we believe climate solutions can make all people's lives better today, and in the future. That requires shifting paradigms to develop socially just ways of addressing the climate crisis that have not yet emerged or become commonplace yet. Generative AI synthesizes and regurgitates information based on existing information. When facing the intertwined crises of climate change and inequality, we believe we must build the new as well as look to the past.
We deeply respect our colleagues, the communities we work with, and our clients and we realize that the use of Generative AI is prevalent. We understand and respect that our project partners may choose to use Generative AI tools. The purpose of being explicit with our commitment to work without Generative AI is to clearly communicate how we work and why we operate in this way.
* When we say Generative AI, we’re referring to AI that creates original content based on machine learning models that seek to simulate processes of the human brain. These models are trained with existing human produced content, tuned by developers, and then generate outputs. SCC’s AI policy focused on Generative AI because it is distinct from other forms of AI that are not designed to produce new outputs.
* We are defining work products and deliverables as:
the original ideas that inform and are used to create project goals,
the process of moving those ideas into material project outcomes, and
the written work products themselves.