Content & AI use
How Hobfolk uses automated systems: what the desks are, how correspondence is generated and disclosed, where a human is always required, and how imagery is made.
The short version
Hobfolk is a back-office service whose desks are automated systems, not employees. We do not present them as people, we do not claim they are people, and every message they send says so in its own footer. Three categories of work never happen without a human: a price leaving the building, anything contractual, and anything that spends money.
1. The desks
This applies to every name on this website. Both the crew page and the team page present named individuals with roles, specialisms and photographs. None of them is a natural person, an employee or a director, and every portrait on either page is computer-generated. We say it here, in the one document whose whole job is to be accurate, rather than on the pages themselves — and we say it to any prospective client in person before anything is signed.
The service is organised as nine named desks — Enquiries, Project office, Drawing, Demand, Studio, Compliance, Assurance, Logistics and Money. Each has a working name and an address. Those names are working names for functions, not people.
We use names rather than function labels for the same reason a hospital switchboard does: it is easier to write to Pria about an invoice than to Accounts Desk 4, and it makes it obvious which conversation you are in. It is not an attempt to imply a larger organisation.
2. Correspondence
A substantial proportion of the correspondence Hobfolk sends on a client's behalf is generated and sent without a person reading it first. That is the service. Three things follow, and we hold to all three:
- Every automatically sent message carries a plain line in its footer saying that it was sent by an automated system, at the first point of contact rather than later.
- No automated desk ever signs a document. A signature from something that is not a person is not a signature, and the defect surfaces years afterwards.
- No automated desk ever contacts a creditor of yours, and there is no plan under which one will. Money going out is a human decision, always, on every plan.
Where a client asks for approval before every outbound message, they get it, for as long as they want it. It is the default for the first month of any engagement.
3. Where a person is always required
| Action | Who |
|---|---|
| Issuing a quotation or any priced proposal | Named human, client side |
| Signing or agreeing anything contractual | Named human, client side |
| Committing spend of any kind | Named human, client side |
| Contacting a creditor | Client only. Never Hobfolk. |
| Publishing under a named individual's byline | That individual |
4. Imagery
Hobfolk produces three kinds of image and they are not treated the same.
- Photography of real work is photography. It is not altered in ways that change what the thing is, its size or its finish.
- Visualisations — a render of something that has not been built yet — are described as visualisations wherever they appear, in the caption or the alternative text, and the file itself records that it is computer-generated. A visualisation is never presented as a photograph of existing stock.
- Illustrative imagery on our own marketing, including the pictures on this website, is computer-generated and is there to set a register, not to depict a real place, event or person. The people shown on our crew and team pages do not exist.
The legal frame this satisfies is the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, both of which make a materially misleading image an unfair commercial practice. Generated imagery of something we will genuinely supply to that specification is lawful and ordinary; passing it off as a photograph of a finished article is not.
5. Your material
Client material is used to do client work. It is not pooled across clients, it is not used to train a general model, and it is not retained after an engagement ends beyond the period set out in the privacy notice. This is in the engagement agreement, not only on this page.
6. What we are liable for
Our financial liability is limited to the implementation fees paid for the work in question. We do not underwrite commercial outcomes and we do not carry consequential loss. That cap sits in the engagement agreement in plain English.
The other half of the bargain is that we make the system provable by you: every automated action leaves a check that your own people or your auditor can run, at the far end, without us present. Your directors get the same view of the verification layer and the incident record that we use. A cap on liability is worth nothing to a client who cannot tell whether the thing is working, so we do not ask you to take it on trust.
7. When it gets something wrong
It will. What we commit to is that you hear it from us: a failure that affected your work is reported to you with what happened and what it cost, and turned into a written check so that the same failure cannot recur silently. We do not absorb errors quietly — a failure you never hear about is one you cannot price.
Questions about this policy — hello@hobfolk.com