About Made By Computers

Origins

Made By Computers™ started as a fun side project to explore AI image generation tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. We started writing prompts and generating images with the intent to turn them into t-shirts and other print goods. Our brand was Made By Computers. We bought the domain, designed a logo, & setup a Shopify store. Our goal was to create a profitable side hustle selling these goods, but as we got further down this road we started to struggle with a couple things:

Ethics - profiting from this technology brought up a ton of ethics questions. Some we could address, others we really could not figure out.
Print On Demand - there are well established products that are fairly easy to use, but we realized creating work at the quality we expect took a lot of manual human intervention tweaking prompts and preparing images for t-shirts. We talked about pivoting to other print goods but ultimately lost momentum with the project.

After taking a short hiatus from the project, we realized the issues with Print On Demand are honestly bullsh*t. It was an easy excuse. This is done all the time, we just needed to put in the effort and do the work. We just lacked motivation. Sure maybe there is money in this hustle, but it was lacking meaning. The real problem was staring us in the face:

Ethics.

This has always been the issue. There are so many questions. Frankly, it can be a bit overwhelming to think about. We wanted easy, clear answers. These don’t exist. But it got us thinking…

Could the Made By Computers brand play a small role in helping others take a first ethical step by labeling their creations?

Made By Computers Version 2.0

We began to look into the area of AI Ethics. Most all of what we found was coming from academics, researches, and developers in the space. It focuses on ensuring these new AI tools and technologies are crafted with clear principles that help and empower people. The Asilomar AI Principles is one of the most seminal works on this. We highly encourage everyone take a few minutes to read this.

We realized the vast majority of our research into AI Ethics was pointing to the responsible creation of the technologies. What is missing is the discussion of responsible use of these tools and technologies. Tools like ChatGPT, Bard, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E 2 are being released into the world at an astonishing pace. With these tools comes the urgent need to discuss the responsible use of AI generated content.

To help start this discussion, we have published an open letter: Thoughts on AI generated Content & Responsible Usage. This outlines six principles we encourage creators and publishers of AI generated content to follow.

To support and encourage the responsible use of AI generated content, we have created Made By Computers Labels. These labels are designed to make AI generated content quickly and easily identifiable. Labels are freely accessible and can be added to AI generated content including images, text, audio, video, and code.

This is where we are today.

What does the future hold?

Well, we have some interesting ideas. If you’d like to support the effort please consider using the labels and sharing them with others. If you want to help make Made By Computers, contact us.