Autumn News & Notes

Lots of news and updates to share this week, including a very busy “Where to Find Us!” I’m going hi-fi and adding emojis (👋) and bolding content to help you power through…

🏆 Congrats to the Team!

We have to start with a big CONGRATULATIONS! to our intern Kairavi Gardé for her nomination for the Rising Sustainability Leader Award by the NC State Business Sustainability Collaborative! Kairavi has been with us since the beginning of the year (with summer off for another amazing internship) and we’re delighted to have her helping us with a project we hope to roll out next year.

I (Jen) am also very proud of the whole team when I share our nomination for the Real. Good. Business. Award! We were so lucky to work with the BSC’s B Clinic in the process of getting our B Corp certification, including our Bee Keeper, Jen Bower. We’re incredibly honored to be recognized for our efforts to continue to contribute to the B Corp community and we look forward to celebrating the Business Sustainability Collaborative’s 10-year Anniversary next week. Hope to see you there!

🦻 WordPress Accessibility Conference

WordPress is hosting an Accessibility “Day” next week, October 15-16. In the ultimate nod to “accessible” content, sessions will run for a full 24 hours, around the world, with recordings available on the YouTube channel after the event.

Registration is free, and topics range from document design to legal perspectives, delivered for beginner and intermediate audience. Learn more and sign up online!

🫠 Proliferation of AI Video & its Output

Over the past few weeks, Meta, YouTube, and OpenAI have all released AI video generation tools/updates. Some of these, like YouTube’s Veo tie-in, have specific and useful integrations. Others, like Meta’s Vibes, seem to create content for content’s sake. Whatever your take on the use case, the volume of AI Slop is certainly on an upward trend.

What is AI Slop?
“Slop”, according to Wikipedia, is the term for the low-quality images and media generated by AI, typically referred to as “quantity over substance and quality.” This slop content is most often generated for use on social media, representing attempts to draw users eye, but without significant effort or meaning. As you can imagine, this slop leads to wasted energy, storage, and compute-cycles, with little to no return value.

Are you generating AI slop? Are you “like”-ing or upvoting it? Could you please not?

 GreenPT

On the opposite end of the spectrum from the new slop machines we have GreenPT, a privacy-focused, green-hosted GPT platform. Recently out of beta, this tool is now available for a 14-day free trial and tiered pricing starting at €4,50/month — that’s about $5.27 for you here in ‘merica.

As you might guess from the pricing, this is a tool hosted in the EU, which may not be right for all users. And while it does have graphic/vision analysis functionality, it cannot generate images or video. Finally, it’s built on open source models, which certainly leans into sustainable values, but delivers experiences that probably won’t meet the standards you may have come to expect from ChatGPT, Claude, and the other high-performing LLMs.

But enough of the downsides. Depending on your AI needs, this model will work for many of you, and at a starting price point well below competitors. I encourage any environmentally-conscious companies to check it out.

 Web Sustainability Guidelines

Finally, an exciting update. The Sustainable Web Interest Group, part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has released their first draft of the inaugural “Web Sustainability Guidelines.” A year of research, stakeholder interviews, and discussion have lead to this wide range of recommendations intended to “make web products and services more sustainable.”

The format for the resource is similar to Web Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), with 92 guidelines and 254 success criteria. More work is ahead, with the goal of releasing a final version by Earth Day, 2026.

You made it! Give yourself a 🍪.