A campaign to replace employees with AI highlights the need to hear the intimate, human-centred meaning of handmade work.
Earlier this year, a series of billboards popped up across the USA, aggressively proclaiming, “Stop hiring humans. The Era of AI Employees is Here.” Preying upon dystopian fears of mass unemployment, this campaign appeared to cheerfully embrace the displacement of human workers. Curiously, they chose to call their AI agents “artisans”. These “artisans” never complained, never tired and always obeyed: “Artisans won’t need a meeting with HR”.
This provoked predictable outrage as politicians such as Bernie Sanders used this campaign to demonstrate the amorality of the tech bros. Sadly, this criticism was all part of the plan. Artisan’s campaign was a masterful example of “rage bait”: the classic “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” gambit. Even more sadly, their superhuman AI agent turns out to be more than a second-rate email spam bot.
The decision to name this company “Artisan” is curious. The term implies an anonymous workmanship. AI has found other ways to exploit this connection. There has been a spate of fake marketing campaigns using AI-generated images of artisans to sell cheap, mass-manufactured products from China. Grace’s bags come with the story of a returning leather worker who is letting go of her remaining stock of lovingly crafted, quality leather handbags. Consumers receive, instead, cheap, poorly made, and foul-smelling vinyl items.
Others are beginning to enter the scene with schemes to exploit artisans themselves. There have been a number of propositions lately to introduce information technologies like blockchains to help boost consumer confidence in the provenance of the handmade. I suspect that many of these are schemes to attract funding for complex systems that end up having impossible compliance requirements.
And then there’s Artisanal Collective, which proposes to use “AI, storytelling, digital product passports, and partnerships to preserve knowledge, verify provenance, and grow regenerative livelihoods.” The platform for this “AI-generated storytelling” is a character called Madam Planet, “Inspired by the timeless grace of Princess Diana and the wild comedic genius of Robin Williams”. This anime-like presenter will feature in a series of promotional videos. This is associated with grand claims such as 20 million monthly viewers.
With very little substance to back this scheme, it is most likely that Artisan Collective is a play to attract some of the huge volume of venture capital flowing into AI ventures. “Every $1 million invested helps catalyse long-term cultural resilience and economic uplift valued at $100 million or more.”
Crucially, however, it would be a mistake to respond to these developments by turning our back on AI entirely. It has many potential benefits for craft. One of the first adopters of ChatGPT I found was a Gujurati weaver who used it for his Instagram posts. It can be a boon for artisans in the Global South who can now communicate directly with an audience with confidence. There are other potential benefits, such as touching up photos of one’s work. An RMIT PhD student, Noha Abed Althubaiti, is now researching its use by Saudi artisans in generating new designs.
The key issue is rather about scale. The idea of an abstract technological platform that can give makers instant access to global markets contradicts the intimate meaning of the handmade. This is expressed well by Judy Frater in her Garland article, Rethinking scale: Craft traditions in the contemporary market.
One thing I hear continually is “scaling up craft production”. Funding agencies overtly or covertly make this a prerequisite for fundable projects. Sometimes scaling up is mentioned in the same breath as lauding the personal aspects of craft! I keenly question the fit of “large scale” and “Folk Art.”
Is this simply an assumption based on an industrial-oriented society? Who is asking for scale in craft? Do artisans want scale? Traditionally, craft was never done in big scale.
Judy’s questioning of scale applies just as much to the current flood of digital promotions as it does to production volume. While Judy was focused on scaling up the production side, the same can be argued now for the AI marketing that rolls out automated promotions. The deluge of “AI slop” is increasing the hunger for the authentic human touch provided by crafts.
The challenge of Garland magazine is to “stay real” by connecting readers to trusted authors—most often the makers themselves. This is the broad mission of culture. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus writes, “The true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says “less”. By “less” he means to focus on the particular: “a facet of the diamond in which the inner luster is epitomized without being limited.”
The future challenge in “crossing the river” into 2026 is to keep ahead of AI-generated videos by finding new ways of presenting the human touch. Some have recommended video shorts as a medium that is accessible to a broader range of makers. Live events are also impossible (at the moment) to synthesise.
We “cross the river” next year in the hope of rediscovering the real world. In William Blake’s words, we hope “To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower”.
This essay was written with the assistance of The Great Library of Alexandria, a digital repository, whose bot enabled me to discover a relevant strain of thought in Albert Camus.
