AI Transparency & Ethics Report

Our Philosophy: Human-Led, AI-Empowered

At Northern Artillery, we believe Artificial Intelligence is a powerful engine for efficiency and exploration, but it is not a replacement for human strategy, taste, or accountability. We use AI to remove friction from our workflows, allowing our developers, designers, and project managers to focus on high-value creative problem solving.

Our Guarantee: No deliverable—whether code, copy, or creative asset—leaves our agency without expert human review, refinement, and approval. We assume full liability for our work, regardless of the tools used to create it.

How We Use AI (The "Traffic Light" Protocol)

We categorise our AI usage into three distinct zones to ensure clarity and safety for our clients.

Creative & Visual Production (Approved Tools: ComfyUI, Nano Banana/Gemini, Photoshop AI)

Our creative and 3D teams use advanced generative tools to accelerate asset creation and ideation.

• Self-hosted open-source generative Ai: Comfyui is a production toolkit allowing artists and designers to build their own Ai workflows, train their own models and generate their own content using Open-source models (Blackforest Lab’s FLUX, QWEN’s 2509 and WAN’s 2.2 and 2.5}. We use this to create high-fidelity 3D concepts, initial concept sketches, lighting references, background elements, high quality texture creation, figurine-style mock-ups. All of which can then be used by our skilled team of human artists and designers in the production pipeline.
• Environmentally friendly Ai: With our small, yet effective self-hosted generative Ai setup, we are not always reliant on global scaled data centres operating at a constant rate. Instead, a high percentage of our generative ai is only activated when required using in house GPU’s allowing us to minimise energy consumption on a global scale, whilst maintaining a more sustainable on-demand production workflow
• Web-Based commercially licenced generative Ai: When our inhouse hardware is at its limit, to keep the content flowing at a commercial rate we use Higgesfeild.ai , This is a commercially licenced, subscription based, Generative ai tool. Allowing us access to the latest in generative Ai models (currently including: Google’s VEO3, Kling’s O1 & 2.6, ByteDance’s Seedance and OpenAI’s SORA2 ) These tool’s allow the creation of a higher rate of motion content using assets created, in house by our skilled, human artists and designer.
• Northern Artillery’s future goal: We at northern artillery are always looking to pave the way forwards in our industry and with AI we are looking to do the same. Our future goal with content creation is to eventually move away from Web-Based Generative Ai Subscriptions. This means improving our current open-source localised setup, becoming completely self sufficiently, not being reliant on global data centers and third parties.
• IP Ownership Note: While we use AI for asset generation, final deliverables are human-assembled and modified to ensure they meet copyright standards. We do not use public AI tools to generate "final" brand logos or trademark-able assets without explicit client consultation.

Development & Engineering (Approved Tools: Gemini CLI with Shopify MCP)

• Boilerplate Code: We use AI to generate standard scaffolding for Shopify Liquid templates inline with our strict coding standards.
• Unit Testing: AI assists us in writing robust test cases to ensure code stability.
• Debugging: We use AI to analyse error logs and suggest optimisation paths for faster issue resolution.
• Safety: No client customer data (PII) or proprietary trade secrets are ever fed into public code generation models.

Project Management & Operations (Approved Tools: Jira Intelligence, Firefly with onedrive)

• Administrative Efficiency: We use AI to transcribe meetings, summarise lengthy requirement documents, and draft initial Jira tickets.
• Data Analysis: AI helps us analyse project velocity and identify potential bottlenecks in our sprint cycles.

Data Privacy & "Red Lines" (Prohibited Usage)

To protect our clients, Northern Artillery strictly enforces the following "Red Lines":

1. No PII in Prompts: No Personally Identifiable Information (customer names, emails, addresses) is ever input into a Large Language Model (LLM).
2. No "Black Box" Code: No AI-generated code is deployed to a Live/Production Shopify environment without a line-by-line review by a Senior Developer.
3. No Training on Client Data: Unless explicitly agreed upon for a specific project (e.g., a custom chatbot), we do not allow our tools to use client-proprietary data to train their public models.

Copyright & Indemnification

Northern Artillery retains ownership of the process, but assigns full ownership of the deliverable to the Client upon payment. We certify that our use of AI tools complies with current licensing agreements and that we accept responsibility for the originality and integrity of the work provided.

• Meta-Disclosure: In the spirit of transparency, this policy document was drafted with the assistance of an LLM to ensure comprehensive coverage of industry standards, and subsequently reviewed, edited, and ratified by the Northern Artillery AI team.