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Human Made, Made by a Real Person: why are we humans starting to label ourselves?

… “written by a real person” … “no AI” … “100% human” …

MARTINA NICOLLS

Jan 9

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I’ve noticed a shift in content creators adding qualifiers to their work, such as human-made, written by a real person, no AI, 100% human. Sometimes it appears in titles or as a reassurance beneath a video, artwork, poem, piece of music, a story, or a voice cast. It’s a moment when a creator feels the need to announce their own humanity.

Why do creators feel the need to differentiate human made and AI content? Platforms might increasingly demand transparency. AI systems can now produce text, images, voices, and videos at a scale and speed never seen before. The internet is filling rapidly with competent, convincing, and often beautiful content whose origins are debatable. When something can be made by anyone, anywhere, in seconds, authorship becomes blurry and effort becomes untraceable.

“Human made” begins to function like a food label: organic, handcrafted, locally sourced. The label signals process. For many creators, I suspect it is less about rejecting AI and more about protecting the time and effort of the creator and the trust of the audience.

“Human made” means that there is a someone behind the work. When creators label something “human made,” they are not just naming authorship. They are stating vulnerability, accountability, transparency, and the possibility of relationship with their audience. They are saying: this product came through a life, my life.

What does this mean for the future of social media content? If platforms become oceans of AI generated material, then human presence may stop being assumed and start being sought. Content might become categorized less by genre and more by origin. For example, not categorized by “what is this?” but by “who is the creator?”

We may see a future of content creation where feeds are filtered by ontology – human, hybrid, or synthetic – rather than by interest. Where “human made” becomes a form of countercurrent by choice rather than by default.

Paradoxically, the more sophisticated, near “human perfect” AI becomes, the more valuable humans become and the more valuable human irregularities may feel, such as a spelling or grammatical error, or a stream of consciousness way of communicating, rather than a formulaic piece of writing.

Will this trend become more common? I think it will. It might not necessarily become a permanent label on everything, but it might become a cultural phase; one that clarifies content whenever a boundary between human and AI becomes blurry.

Some say we label what we fear losing. “Handwritten” once mattered only when printing arrived, and “live” mattered only when recording became possible. So, “human-made” is emerging precisely because its opposite is now ubiquitous.

The label may fade in time, but the desire behind it may not. The phrase itself may evolve. Another term may replace it, or it may become redundant once new norms are established.

The deeper question it carries will remain: what is it that only a living person brings to content creation. Is it intention, memory, authenticity of emotion, suffering, care, moral weight, or the capacity for an audience to feel and connect with a creator? We may discover that “human made” is not a technical category at all, but a relational one; a way of saying, this was created by someone who accepts a relationship with the viewer, the user, the audience.

Perhaps the more unsettling question is: if we increasingly need to label human work, what have we allowed the default to become? What might we risk losing if we stop noticing the difference?

This issue is not only about protecting creatives and communicators. It is about training people about perception and whether we continue to value real individuals over infinite production. It is about whether future generations will grow up assuming that creative expression comes from human beings or from non-human systems.

“Human made” may look like a small label, but it carries a very old desire. And that is to know that somewhere, in the vast circuitry of the modern world, a real person is still creating, and is still speaking.

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