Whew! It’s been a whirlwind here of projects, deadlines, and more projects, so much so that I’m squeaking this blog post in at the end of the month… The very last day! I’m hoping to get caught up on sending new Cool Things for Cool People, but for now, I wanted to re-introduce you to this heart project: Hire Human Artists.
4 months ago, I introduced you to Hire Human Artists. It was a spreadsheet directory I was building to host a variety of artists that are hirable or licensable, so if you need art for your project, and you don’t want to get scammed by generative AI in the Fiverr trenches, you can easily find an artist who has outwardly spoken against generative AI and pledged not to use it in the creation of their works.
So… Four months later, almost 500 artists have come through, our volunteer vetting team of 14 people have helped vet all of these wonderful people, and we’ve added them to the directory. The spreadsheet circulated far and wide fast but… There’s a lot to be desired about a spreadsheet.
I had said when creating it that if people were using it, I’d flesh it out more, and over the past couple of months that’s what I’ve been working on in the background.
Now, Hire Human Artists is a directory website, viewable on mobile and desktop, with consolidated genres, styles, mediums, and project types, all of which are filterable. You can also browse by specific geolocated position (just countries right now), and most of all… It has images. Artists can now purchase an image for their listing for as little as $1, which helps cover the hosting, domain, and software costs.
I am so excited to share this out. I already shared it on Bluesky and we had applications open for about ten whole minutes before 100 artists filled up the slots. I’m excited, you’re excited… And I hope we can help return some trust in artists with this resource.