Claim “Made by a human is the new luxury” sounds like a pitch deck, and pitch decks are rarely liable for anything. Let us test the sentence anyway, as a hypothesis. The thesis of this text: it is not the hand that creates value, but the fact that someone is liable. A label without responsibility is decoration.
Premium First the evidence, and it is narrower than the slogan suggests. It concerns images, art prints and poems, not luxury goods. Lane et al. (2026) ran real-money auctions for prints and poem mugs whose content came from humans or from AI, with comparable baseline appeal. In the broad UK sample, after controlling for that appeal, bids for human-made items were higher: by £0.82 for the prints and £1.10 for the mugs. Whether that holds for a flacon, nobody knows. It remains a hypothesis.
Decision Why do people pay more? Granulo, Fuchs and Puntoni (2021) find the stronger preference for human labour where a product says something about its buyer, and explain it with a desire for uniqueness. According to the authors, the effect also appears when humans only designed a product but neither made nor touched it. For designers, that is the delicate part: the decision counts, not the hand.
Name What does a decision with a name look like? Guillaume de Seynes, executive vice president of Hermès, says: “We still believe each piece is made by one person, because this is where the artisanal aspect resides.” And: “Each bag has a personal mark, so every bag is identifiable.” Sometimes those marks return decades later: a woman shows an artisan a rare crocodile bag, and the artisan says: “I think I made your bag.” His grandfather, Robert Dumas, is said to have defined a luxury object as one you can repair (Maisey, 2025). This is a house describing itself, not independent evidence. But it shows the structure: the seal is a name with a deadline. Being liable means still being reachable when something breaks.
Tolerance How do I recognise something handmade? By the imperfect surface. Though perfect handwork exists too. What matters is a tolerance in seeing: the eye accepts deviation as beauty. That is the essence. And handmade things do not come in bulk. It is finite. My example: I have bought several pencils from Nicholas Hemingway, a maker in England of writing instruments in wood and metal. My favourite is his copper lead holder. The copper gathers patina, partly from being held. It changes with use. It lives along.
Flacon And the flacon? It is usually made industrially; the hand sits in the decision: weight, joints, take-back, the route of the glass. In the Butterfly model, everyone carries responsibility for origin, route and disposal. In the note Precisely Into the Bottle Bank, six language models could not name this chain. As a hypothesis: a flacon with a name would be one that someone takes back.
Comparison Now the barbs. First, the bonus partly lives on contrast. In Horton et al. (2023), paintings labelled as AI-made fared worse; in the last experiment their estimated monetary value was 62 per cent lower. And an image labelled human-made seemed more creative when one labelled AI-made had been shown before. Among 18 to 34 year olds, the premium for prints in Lane et al. (2026) practically vanished (£6.23 versus £6.38); whether that is age or cohort, the authors leave open. And according to the abstract, disclosing that a product comes from humans has no effect for functional or for highly creative products (Sikhondze et al., 2025). The sentence lives on its opposite.
Distinction Second: humans are not yet responsibility. In Milan, a court placed units of Armani and Dior under administration in 2024. The competition authority fined Armani 3.5 million euros for misleading ethical claims; at several subcontractors, safety devices had been removed from machines, workers were fully or partly undeclared, and an Armani quality inspector had been visiting monthly for about six months, responsible for quality, not for working conditions (AGCM, 2025b; Kent, 2024). The Dior case ended without a finding of infringement, but with commitments of 2 million euros (AGCM, 2025a). The Business of Fashion reports that, according to investigators, a Dior bag sold for 2,600 euros was assembled for 53 euros (Kent, 2024); Dior rejects this as false, saying these were partial assemblies of men’s leather goods. What was punished were ethical claims, not “handmade” claims. There were plenty of hands; liability only came from the authority. McGurk and Khachaturov (2026) expect the premium to be paid mainly by buyers with capital; that, they note, is not yet proven.
Decoration Which leaves the “human-made” badges. Not By AI allows its badge if you yourself estimate that at least 90 per cent of the content is human-made. It is not an AI detection tool, the site says; whoever uses the badge is accountable for following the rule (Not By AI, n.d.). That is honest, and precisely for that reason decoration: liability by self-assessment. The reverse holds: luxury is not what a human has made. Luxury is what a human must take back.
Sources
AGCM (2025a, 21 May). The Italian Competition Authority secures 2 million euro over 5 years from Dior for victims of labour exploitation (PS12805). https://en.agcm.it/en/media/press-releases/2025/5/PS12805 (full text)
AGCM (2025b, 1 August). Italian Competition Authority: fine of 3.5 million euros on the companies Giorgio Armani S.p.A. e G.A. Operations S.p.A. for unfair commercial practice (PS12793). https://en.agcm.it/en/media/press-releases/2025/8/PS12793 (full text)
Granulo, A., Fuchs, C. & Puntoni, S. (2021). Preference for human (vs. robotic) labor is stronger in symbolic consumption contexts. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 31(1), 72–80. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1181 (full text)
Horton, C. B., White, M. W. & Iyengar, S. S. (2023). Bias against AI art can enhance perceptions of human creativity. Scientific Reports, 13, 19001. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-45202-3 (full text)
Kent, S. (2024, 17 September). Inside luxury’s Italian sweatshops problem. The Business of Fashion. https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/sustainability/luxury-sweatshops-italy-investigation-dior-armani/ (full text)
Lane, T., Pickard, H., Walker, M. J. & Heinrich, T. (2026). A silver lining? Consumer preferences over human-made and AI-generated production in two domains. Creative PEC Discussion Paper. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22111802 (full text)
Maisey, S. (2025, 14 October). “Scarcity is not a goal for us”: Hermès’ Guillaume de Seynes. The National. https://www.thenationalnews.com/magazine/2025/10/14/hermes-brikin-kelly-guillaume-de-seynes/ (full text)
McGurk, E. & Khachaturov, D. (2026). Human-provenance verification should be treated as labor infrastructure in AI-saturated markets. arXiv, 2605.03210. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03210 (full text)
Not By AI (n.d.). Not By AI: Add the badge to your human-created content. https://www.notbyai.fyi/ (full text)
Sikhondze, B., Ye, H. J., Wang, W., Zhan, X. & Santhanam, R. (2025). Are you willing to pay for generative AI products? Disentangling the disclosure effects and the mediating role of psychological value. Journal of Management Information Systems, 42(2), 431–456. https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2025.2487314 (abstract only)
