We think you should know where we use artificial intelligence in our business, and - just as importantly - where we don't.
Our designs come from our archive
Every print, wallpaper and braid begins with a real thing: an antique textile, a fragment, a printed document from the archive Caroline Inchyra has built up over years. Sometimes we reproduce it faithfully, because the original needs nothing from us. More often we re-work it - recolouring, adjusting the scale or the repeat, taking out what doesn't belong, redrawing, until it becomes recognisably Inchyra.
That editing is the whole job. It is where the collection gets its character, and it is done by us.
Nothing about that has changed since AI arrived. We design exactly as we did before any of this existed, and we intend to go on doing so. AI plays no part in it, and it never will. Nothing we sell has been generated by a machine.
Where we do use it
Behind the scenes, in the running of this website and the day-to-day work of a small team. It helps us:
- build and maintain our product listings and website copy, which saves us a great deal of time
- keep things consistent and correct across hundreds of pages - measurements, repeats, compositions, the spelling of a French village
- produce room visualisations that show how a fabric or paper might look in a setting
All of it makes a very small team more efficient - time is the thing we never have enough of, and this is how we make ours go further. It helps keep our mailing lists in good order, and it is why the Diary exists at all. Caroline's Diary is written by Caroline: the thinking, the opinions and the observations are hers, and it still takes her the best part of a day every month to produce. AI helps pull the observations from each month into shape; it does not do the thinking.
Images
Any image created or altered by AI is labelled 'digitally rendered visualisation' wherever it appears. We have always done this and we always will. Everything else - our collections, our workroom, the house - is a real photograph, taken by us or by the photographers we work with.
A word on colour: no screen renders linen truly, whether the image is a photograph or a visualisation. Please do order a sample before you commit. We would always rather you saw the cloth itself.
A person is always responsible
Whatever the tool, the judgement is ours. Nothing is published here without being read, checked and approved by one of us, and we stand behind all of it.
If you have any questions about any of this, do get in touch - we are very happy to talk about it.