Entrepreneurs! Create a “Human-Made” label and help us all
May 31, 2026
By Matthew Pietz
This article was written and edited without the use of AI.
What is essentially human? What activities should stay human? A fun topic at cocktail hour (or at least one to inspire another round), but in these times an increasingly relevant question, and a weighty one. One popular answer is art. Diverse creators from Billie Eilish to Sarah Silverman to Daniel Okrent have come out fighting the onslaught of AI-made content.
But how do you know what you’re looking at, or listening to, didn’t come from a data center? At Keranaut we predict that within a few years, people will pay a premium for music, art, and writing that they can be confident was made by a human being. Research has already shown that when AI art enters a market, it crowds out the things made by humans, lowering prices for human works. Some economists have argued this is a net positive, since people are paying less for “art”, but we feel only an economist could see the upside in this.
To experience the thin end of the wedge in music, for example, you just have to walk into a shop. Have you noticed in recent months that more locations are playing bland, highly repetitive songs packed densely with lyrics that rhyme but don’t make a lot of sense? This week one associate of ours was in a restaurant blasting easy listening with the lyric “My heart will take a new breath”, unlikely to have been written by something with a heart or breath.
It costs a store owner very little to subscribe to Apple Music and let some money trickle down to organic musicians. Youtube is awash in AI content, and streaming platform Deezer says AI content makes up 35% of new uploads—50,000 tracks a day.
Artists (and their labels) are fighting back, but consumers need help too. What to do?
Well, If you want to buy coffee and be reasonably sure it was ethically made, you can look for the Fair Trade label. Farmers pay a fee to get certified as Fair Trade producers, and some of those funds are used for community projects. Evidence shows this system does benefit participants, though it is incomplete and subject to abuse. Likewise, the Kimberly Process for diamonds guarantees rebel armies weren’t enriched by your purchase, even if it doesn’t account for labor rights or environmental damage.
Imperfect as they are, ethical labels can provide a model for Human Made art certifications. Artists would pay a fee to get certified, and a credible and trusted verifier (that could be you, entrepreneurial reader) confers their seal on the artist’s website or social media, using a cryptographic hash to foil fakes. The Human Made label can give those who enjoy paintings, novels and songs the confidence that their money is going to a person who put their heart into making something beautiful for the world, and not to a server farm polluting the neighborhood while it rearranges fragments of human art it stole from the web.
Get paid and help keep art human? We can’t think of a better venture. The tools are out there, and the need exists. Sooner or later someone is going to carry this out, and reader, it might as well be you.
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