It’s been a whole quarter since I launched Crystallized Intelligence with the goal of making a real impact on AI in Luxembourg.
I wanted to re-introduce myself, and take the opportunity to talk about some of the reasons behind certain choices I’ve made with the company’s operations, branding, and client targeting.
I started this company because I see the advent of AI as an extremely pivotal moment in human history. We have a real opportunity here to change the way that work gets done, especially information-based work, so we can spend more time doing things that bring us joy.
At the same time, AI is increasingly scrutinized for its negative impacts:
- Environmental: the vast amount of energy, water, space, and mining resources needed to continue feeding this beast.
- Political: the billionaires who suffer from a lack of connection with reality and spend their days disparaging the working class.
- Cultural: everyone’s favourite new word, “enshittification”, making the internet and real life a worse place to be.
Part of the reason I started this company was to push back on what I view as uncreative, unserious use of this revolutionary tool: things like making fake salespeople to spam prospects, generating fake images that might actually make you look worse, and giving AI access to customer data without their consent or any understanding of the implications.
I first became aware of the anxiety around AI from artist friends, who felt vulnerable not to a legitimate “talent” from AI, but to the perception that their work was worth less now that an AI could create something “passable”. These were people who had previously been able to pay for their lives through art, either partially or in full, and could now see art on a mass scale being sucked into this machine without artists’ consent — used to generate a facsimile approximation of their work, with only a small cost associated: a good amount of carbon released into the atmosphere.
This is why I chose to use classical art as part of my branding, juxtaposed with modern design elements: to honour the dignity of artists, and of human creativity and effort, without which none of this world would exist. Also, it stood out on LinkedIn.
To get to the point, I built something to prove this could work in practice: Crystallized Social, a social-media graphic-making tool.
“But Aisling,” you ask, “isn’t this exactly against your ambitions?”
No — not the way I’ve built it.
Instead of generating an image from scratch each round with AI, each client is equipped during onboarding with a set of concrete templates: unchanging ways of assembling information, design elements, and real images in a way that respects your branding and gives you the opportunity to post different types of content (from carousels to landscape ads to photo collages). The templates are made of code — HTML and CSS, which is then captured as an image using a Python function. It’s AI-first because it does help write a caption and add text to the template, as well as suggest which featured image to use from a library like Pexels, but it uses far less energy per image while respecting human creative work.
It can also be hooked up to a brand-specific library of professional, paid photography or graphic images. The possibilities are endless.
It’s honestly not that far off from Claude Design, except that it’s more driven by the platform, so you’re not going off on a design adventure — your templates exist, your brand elements are defined, and you merely need to prompt for the particular post you’re trying to make. It also has lower token usage (meaning it’s less expensive), since it’s constrained to the pre-made templates and uses a lower-cost Mistral model in the backend.
This is not the only project I intend to launch, but it’s illustrative of my methods: finding ways to actually make work easier, without spending a crazy amount of time or resources on “unconstrained” AI tools (like the aforementioned Claude Design), and improving the reputation of AI tools by considering how they impact the world around them, not just a company’s bottom line.
If this sounds like your kind of tool when it comes to AI, and you are looking for AI-native services consulting in Luxembourg or the surrounding region, I invite you to get in touch and talk to me about onboarding. But if you have another idea, I’d also like to talk to you about how to build it. The sky is truly the limit now: we are all able to become creators, but it’s important to try and create responsibly.