Artificial Intelligence: Ethical Ways To Use New Tools In Your Small Business
We’ll be honest, we have mixed feelings about Artificial Intelligence.
Does the perceived magic of these tools outweigh the ethical concerns that accompany them? Does it actually save time if you have to fact-check and review everything it produces? Is using these tools safe from a legal perspective or can you get into trouble later on?
While we can’t know all the answers to those questions, we wanted to share a little bit of perspective on the topic since we know there are lots of opportunities but also lots of pitfalls.
What Counts As Artificial Intelligence?
Without getting technical and making your eyes glaze over, let’s roll back and start at the beginning. AI has permeated our lives likely more than you realize in a wide range of industries so we wanted to share a few examples of the obvious apps as well as the subtle tools we’ve been using for decades.
Obviously, ChatGPT, DALL-E, IBM’s Watson, MidJourney, and Aurora are what we think of when someone mentions AI, but there are so many more ways it’s integrated into our lives:
- Digital assistants like Google, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri
- Driverless cars
- Chatbots
- Social media feed algorithms
- Data analysis
- Fraud detection
- Facetune and photo filters
- Spam filters and anti-virus software programs
- Disease diagnostics
- E-commerce and retail customer prediction and personalization
- Maps, traffic monitoring, and rerouting
- Google searches and anything else with a recommendation engine
- Your Spotify Wrapped
- Smart home devices
- Depositing a check in your banking app
- Facial recognition to unlock your phone or go through security at the airport
- Duolingo and other customized learning tools
- Creation tools like Canva’s background remover, Microsoft Word’s spell checker, or the Google Docs predictive text that’s popping up right now as we write this
- Some manufacturing robots
- Some video and computer games
What AI Tools Can Help Your Small Business Marketing?
There are a few tools that make marketing your winery, fitness studio, or comic book shop so much easier so we recommend investigating to see if you can easily implement them in your regular operations. In order of simplicity:
- Working with the social media feed algorithms (impossible to avoid)
- Content creation
- Smart home devices aren’t just for homes. You can have your bookstore, dance studio or brewery just as connected so you can make sure lights are off, doors are locked, and vibes are high.
- ChatGPT can be used for outlining blog content to make sure you’ve covered everything you want to share, or to get a starting point for your draft.
- Personalize customer communication: You can set up parameters based on demographics, behaviors and more to deliver an ideal message to each customer. If you’re a gym for example, you can send an email or display an advertisement based on the type of classes or workouts they usually do. Yoga images and class schedules to yoga folks, and boxing photos and schedules to boxing enthusiasts.
- Chatbots: We do recommend a very simple chatbot on your website or automated messages on your social media for customer service purposes during off hours. You can set up the chatbot to answer a simple set of questions with approved answer sets. If you haven’t approved an answer to the question someone asks your customer has, the bot can let them know that they’ve tagged the question for a staff member to answer when they are back in the office.
How To Get The Most Out Of Artificial Intelligence Tools?
If you’re going to use the more complex AI tools, you’ll need a little bit of patience as you teach your iteration of the app what you like. We find it’s best to ask a very specific question versus a more broad one. A good example might be: “What are some board game conventions happening in Ohio in the first half of 2025?” You should be able to quickly get a list and then visit those sites to confirm dates, locations, and if you’d like to attend to promote your business.
A bad example would be: “How do I market my business?” You’ll likely get some generic answers with no actionable insights. If that’s truly your question, adding specificities like location, industry, products, budget, and skills might yield better results. For example, “Can you give me ideas for how to improve customer retention for my garden center in Central Ohio with a budget of $10,000?” Then adding context like, “We are busy enough in the spring, but would like to increase sales during summer, fall and winter months.”
Our second recommendation is to always ask for follow-up information or tweaks. Whatever it delivers, you should continue adding detail to your requests. If it spits out that you should become a plant influencer on Twitter but that doesn’t really align with your ethics, then share that with your AI so it can revise its recommendations and get you closer to a helpful approach
Knowing how to prompt the tool efficiently and effectively can be a powerful tool for growing your small business.
What Makes Some AI Unethical or Unsafe For Your Business?
While these tools can be extremely beneficial, there are a few things to consider related to your business’s values. The ethical issues related to AI are hotly debated between people far smarter than we are, so we don’t intend to give you a black-and-white answer about whether you should use it at all. But we do want to point out a few things so you can make informed decisions.
Artificial intelligence starts with massive amounts of data. And that data had to come from somewhere. Some argue that this data, be it written content shared publicly, private documents stored in the Cloud, or art shared on a portfolio or social media platform, was “stolen” and used to build the AI databases without permission of the data owners and creators. Unfortunately because of the nature of our culture, these large businesses can simply update their terms of service and require you to agree to give away your data and creative work in order to keep using their tools and platforms (some of which are how writers, artists, and small business owners make their living). So similar to how we want chocolate makers and clothing companies to follow their supply chains back to the origin and ensure they are paying workers fairly and getting the highest quality ingredients, we want to make sure we’re doing the same with any creative work we produce as well.
The legality of it all is still questioned regularly so we want to be careful how much we rely on AI in case it all gets hobbled in the future.
And all that data isn’t perfect anyway. It can weigh the importance or truth of a piece of information based on the volume or number of times it’s mentioned by “important” sources. It even can prioritize revenue over human life, ignoring specific expert opinions like we’ve seen recently with health insurance claim denials. It also has immense bias including racism and sexism. Sometimes statistics and sources are made up or not verifiable, and many people don’t know how or don’t make the effort to fact-check or investigate. In short, there is a LOT of misinformation presented as facts, however, a little critical thinking could help you see through that. As AI grows so must our media literacy training for all ages.
This leads to our next point:, the time and effort you spent asking questions, making tweaks, fact-checking, and revising what the AI tool gave you, does it really save you time at all, or would you have been able to get to your final result more quickly on your own?
Oof, we know we sound like old people who are anti-growth and anti-technology. That’s far from the truth. But like we said at the top, we have some reservations.
A fourth and final point of contention we wanted to highlight is the sustainability of AI. While we can use AI to help us solve some complex problems related to climate change, each AI query response uses as much as 10 times more energy than a typical search. Data center energy use has doubled since 2022 and the more people adopt the regular use of AI, the more that will increase. We’d feel a little better if the data centers were using renewable energy, but the U.S. just doesn’t have the capacity needed yet.
Does Pastimes Use AI in Customer Deliverables?
Of course there is no black and white answer. We certainly write content to play with the algorithm on social media, and spellcheck in our content creation tools as an example. But if we’re developing a marketing strategy or content for you, we will never get that fully from something like ChatGPT. Those apps are helpful tools, but they are just that, tools. We’ve been marketing for small businesses for a combined 25+ years. And while, no, we don’t have all the knowledge of the internet, we also have been practicing using appropriate tools,, AI and otherwise, and can deliver a customized marketing strategy that will make your marketing more fun and effective, and less of a headache for you.