Supporting human artists in the AI era

Most advice on this subject is a list of feelings. Here is a list of actions, ordered by how much difference each one makes to a working artist.

Things that materially help

Commission work. This is first by a wide margin and it is not close. A commission is direct income, a portfolio piece, and a reference, three things at once. The gap between admiring someone’s work and paying for a piece of it is where nearly all the value sits.

Buy the thing rather than the tip. Prints, books, albums, zines, licences. Purchases build a sales history that supports pricing, gallery applications and future rates. Tips do not.

Pay for licences properly. Using an image commercially under a personal-use licence is the most common way a small business quietly underpays an illustrator. Check the terms and pay for the tier you are actually using.

Subscribe directly. Recurring income is what lets someone plan. The platform matters far less than the recurrence.

Hire for judgement, not just execution. The durable value in creative work is taste, knowing which of forty options is the right one. Briefs written around judgement pay better, and survive automation better, than briefs written around output volume.

Things that help more than people expect

Credit by name, publicly. Attribution is how a freelancer gets the next job. Naming the illustrator in the post costs nothing and is worth more than the same praise sent privately.

Recommend specific people. “Who should I hire for this?” is the question that starts most freelance work. Being someone’s answer is a real contribution.

Ask about process before assuming. The reflex to interrogate whether work is AI-generated lands hardest on the artists who did the work. The Stanford research on detection false positives, human writing by non-native English speakers flagged as machine-written 61% of the time, is a warning about the cost of a confident accusation.

Buy from the artist, not the aggregator. Marketplace and print-on-demand fees take a share of every sale. An artist’s own store usually pays them considerably more per unit.

Things that mostly do not help

Engagement without transaction. Likes, saves and follows are not income, and increasingly are not even reach.

“Exposure.” Still a way of asking for free work.

Anti-AI commentary in place of purchases. Sharing an artist’s frustration costs nothing. Buying something costs money and pays their rent. Both are fine; only one is support.

Detector screenshots. Accusing someone of using AI on the basis of a tool documented to be unreliable causes real harm and settles nothing.

If you are a business

Write AI terms into contracts explicitly. Ambiguity about whether a deliverable may be generated, and about whether the artist’s work may be used to train a model, gets resolved against the freelancer by default. Put it in writing.

Pay kill fees. Cancelling a commissioned project after the artist has cleared the time is a cost you moved onto them.

Adopt provenance standards. Certification and Content Credentials only mean something if buyers ask for them. Demand is what makes a standard real.

Set a floor, not a target. Deciding that certain work will always be commissioned from people is a policy. Deciding to “support artists where possible” is a preference, and preferences lose to budgets.