AI Usage.
Where artificial intelligence appears in what we publish and what we ship, what we will not use it for, and who is accountable for the result. Written plainly, because a policy nobody reads protects nobody.
Scope
This policy covers 500x Tech Labs' own use of generative and machine-learning tools: in the material we publish on this website, and in the work we deliver to clients. It sits alongside our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
It does not describe a conversational assistant. We have built and tested one internally; it is not deployed on this site, and no page here collects or processes conversational data. If that changes, this policy and the Privacy Policy will change with it, before the feature ships and not after.
Imagery on this site
The film on our homepage is a deliberate mix, and the distinction matters:
Generated
The environments are synthesised — the interior architecture, the factory hall, the lighting and the camera moves through them. They are illustrations of a setting, not photographs of a place. Where a scene depicts a facility, a storefront or an interior, you should not assume it is a photograph of our client's premises, and we do not present it as one.
Real
The work itself is never generated. Every interface, logo, package, label and screen composited into the film is the actual artefact we designed and delivered — the Ekaa platform views, the Whispers screens, the Pecan Street packaging, the Batli bottle artwork. That is the entire point of the piece: the frame around the work may be drawn, the work never is.
Marked
Where a movement is a self-initiated concept study rather than a commissioned engagement, it carries that statement visibly within the movement itself and on the corresponding case study, not in a footnote.
AI in client work
We use machine learning as a component where it earns its place in a product — recommendation, classification, forecasting, extraction — and we use generative tooling to move faster through exploration, drafting and iteration.
Two commitments govern this. First, we tell clients where AI is used in their deliverables, including in the exploratory stages, so it is never discovered later. Second, where a client's own licensing, procurement or regulatory position restricts generative tooling, that restriction governs and we work within it.
Any model we build into a client's product is documented: what it was trained or fine-tuned on, what it is allowed to decide, how it fails, and how a human overrides it.
Provenance and rights
- We confirm commercial-use rights and any attribution requirement for a generation tool before it is used on paid output.
- We do not prompt for, or knowingly reproduce, a living artist's or studio's distinctive style by name.
- We do not feed a third party's copyrighted work into a model to derive from it. Public-domain source material is used from its original scan, not from someone else's derivative of it.
- No trademark is ever generated. Where a brand's marks would otherwise appear in generated imagery, the mark is excluded and the object is an unbranded original design.
- Generated assets delivered to a client are identified as such in the handover, so the client can make their own licensing assessment.
Human accountability
A person is responsible for everything we publish or deliver. Generated material is reviewed frame by frame before it ships — for accuracy, for anything that reads as a real mark or a real place, and for the failure modes generation is prone to: malformed text, invented interface labels, plausible-looking detail that is simply wrong.
We have rebuilt generated interface imagery by hand precisely because of this. When dashboards came back with garbled labels, the answer was to rebuild the interface as real code and capture it, not to ship something that looked right at a glance.
What we will not do
- Generate photorealistic imagery of identifiable minors. Where a child appears in commissioned work, it is a real shoot with a signed parental release.
- Generate a real, identifiable person's likeness without their written consent.
- Generate a real company's trademarks, livery or identifiable premises.
- Present generated imagery as documentary photography of an event, a place or a result.
- Publish an invented statistic, outcome or testimonial. Numbers on this site are either counted from artefacts we produced or reported to us by the client, and which is which is stated.
- Use client data or client-confidential material to train a general-purpose model.
Your data
Nothing on this website sends your information to a model. The contact form collects only what you type into it and reaches us by email; its handling is covered by the Privacy Policy.
Changes
We will update this policy when our practice changes, and the revision date below will change with it. Material changes — particularly any that introduce processing of your data — will be reflected here before the change takes effect.
Contact
Questions about anything above, including a request for the provenance of a specific image on this site, reach us at hello@500x.tech.