The Future of AI at Ruxstons

Gabriel Purdey
3 days ago
4 min read

✨ Drop into Ruxstons and take a moment just for you ✨

A freshly baked sausage roll, paired with a perfectly crafted cup of coffee ☕🥐

Slow down, reset, and enjoy the simple things.

We’ll have the coffee ready. 💛

We have all seen posts like the above, AI generated and devoid of creative thought or personality. At Ruxstons we pledge to keep creative fields completely AI free.

Artificial Intelligence Future

AI clearly has a future and is already used in many fields, as it has been for years in things as basic as spell checkers. What we want to talk about specifically is its growing use in creative work, and how the more smaller companies rely on it, the more it favours larger, established businesses. The very thing people believe is saving them time, is often limiting their growth.

We rarely post about things that aren’t directly related to our shop and what we sell. However, we will make an exception here. One of the key pillars of Ruxstons is authenticity, being individuals and creating something unique. New team members are taken aside and told to identify what makes them unique, find their strengths, and use those skills to help develop the business. They’re encouraged to take risks with new ideas, and if something doesn’t work, it’s not the end of the world. Just try again the next day. Anyone who suggests copying other businesses is politely told we don’t do that here.

Why businesses are turning to AI?

Increasingly, small businesses and organisations are relying on AI as a long-term way to cut wage bills or save personal time. The result is work that not only lacks quality but, more importantly, offers nothing distinctive. In a creative sense, AI is repeating patterns it finds elsewhere online. If you don’t provide anything unique, what do you offer? And how do you advance your cause by doing exactly what everyone else is doing?

A friend who is a graphic designer was recently replaced by AI, and a content writer I’ve worked with has had hours cut for the same financial reasons. The outcome is obvious. Social media posts that all look and sound the same, like our example above. Once you notice it, you can’t “unsee” it. The short sentences, the double hyphens, phrases like “elevate”, “good vibes” or "fluff" with a liberal sprinkling of emoji's thrown in. We’ve even been approached by people offering to run social media accounts for us, after promising to save us time we look closely at their work and see they’re simply using AI themselves! Unfortunately this is not an isolated incident, if you have outsourced your social media to someone you want to make sure they are not simply using AI.

AI is damaging small businesses not large ones

Why do we care? Because the more AI is used for work that requires creativity, the less creativity people are encouraged to develop. Problem solving depends on creativity, and without it businesses and organisations stagnate. It’s already difficult for smaller businesses to compete with larger ones that have economic, personnel and historical advantages, but it remains possible. To take on that challenge, you need a range of skills such as creativity, stress management, competitiveness, spatial pattern recognition, flexibility and lateral thinking. AI will not help you with these skills. Logic dictates you don’t catch and overtake someone up by copying them, yet that’s the approach many now seem to be choosing. The result is that overuse of AI actually strengthens large companies’ advantages which in turn reduces choice for consumers.

Ruxstons Chocolates - All handmade and unique

For these reasons, the creative areas of our business will remain AI free. Team members who write or design for Ruxstons don’t need to worry about being replaced by software. It would be insulting to tell people who contribute their time and effort here that AI will be doing our creative work going forwards, and it would completely undermine what Ruxstons stands for. Humans make mistakes, but they also create genuinely new ideas that solve problems. AI will undoubtedly assist with things like data processing and analysis, but when it comes to creative and original thought, nothing we’ve seen so far makes us worry about being remembered as Luddites of the 21st century.

Have we ever used AI?

Naturally at Ruxstons we like to try a range of different options, we have of course experimented and used it at times. It has certainly proved useful in analysing large amounts of data and helping us predict busy and quiet periods, the best days of the month and the days when you don't need to be quite so positive when baking our home made sausage rolls. There is no doubt it is helpful here. There will be many ways it can help also that we have not considered yet,

Being totally honest we have, in the past, experimented using it for writing, it would be foolish to not try something due to closed mindedness. It started as a spell and grammar checker but evolved into "bulking product descriptions out". The problem is at that point our natural desire to grow made it more tempting for it to take on a bigger role, maybe with really intelligent prompts we said it could actually describe the product itself. Definitely the end justifies the means idea came come into play here, as it would for many businesses owners. However it does become quickly clear that it is no faster when you want the really top quality writing, you end up editing so much it has actually not helped at all. So not only was it no quicker, but it was considerably worse quality. So the idea was scrapped after a week or so of testing.