Our AI Policy
Maker Marketplace exists to connect talented American artisans with people who truly care about craft. Our ethos is inherently anti-AI -- a breath of fresh air, we think, in a world that could use one. Like any business today, we use AI in a few places. Here’s exactly where, and where we never will.
First off, the products are always real
Every piece on Maker Marketplace is made by hand, by an artisan, in their own workshop or home.
We never use AI to design a product, generate a product, or invent one that did not exist. We never use it to change a product’s color, material, grain, glaze, hardware, proportions, finish, or condition. We don’t retouch a maker’s work, smooth it, sharpen it, or clean it up in any way, because the imperfections, the uniqueness, and the handmade quality of our goods is why we exist.
No exceptions, no thresholds, no “lightly edited.” The object in the photograph is the object that arrives at your door!
Most of what you see is an ordinary photograph
Our makers work fast and make one-of-one pieces. They photograph their work where it was made — on the workbench, in whatever light they have, with sawdust on the floor and a half-finished commission in the background. Those photographs are unretouched, and they’re the majority of what you will see when you drill down to a specific product on this website.
Some photographs place a real product in a composite scene
A maker who finishes a dining table on Thursday and ships it Monday doesn’t have weeks to take it out for a styled photoshoot. So we’ll sometimes take their
real
product photograph and place it into a room, so you can see the piece at scale and picture it in your own space.
Two things are always true about those images:
Again, the product itself is never touched.
It’s the maker’s own photograph, placed into the photo unaltered. Before publishing, we compare the original and the finished image side by side at full magnification. If the color, the grain, or the hardware has shifted at all, the image is discarded rather than corrected.
The room may or may not be real.
Sometimes it’s licensed photography or our own archival photoshoots. Sometimes it’s AI-generated. Either way it’s a setting, not a claim — the furniture, plants, and props around the piece aren’t for sale.
Furniture retailers have been rendering their room scenes for well over a decade; the line we care about is that the
product
is photographic truth.
Where AI does show up
We’d rather list this than let you find it.
- Constructed room scenes around a real product photograph, as described above, always labeled.
- Illustrated backgrounds for our educational posts on social media — joinery types, wood species, caring for a glazed finish. These contain no product and are labeled as illustrations.
- Ordinary back-office work: spell checking, alt text for screen readers, tagging, and drafting text that a person then edits.
We never strip metadata or otherwise disguise a generated image to evade detection.
What we require of our makers
Makers photograph and upload their own work, and the same rule binds them: the photograph must be of the actual piece, and the piece must not be AI-generated, AI-designed, or AI-retouched. We can ask any maker for process photos, sketches, or original camera files to confirm a piece was made by hand, and we remove listings that don’t hold up.
Any maker can object to how their work has been presented. If a maker asks us to pull a composite image of their piece, we remove it within 24 hours and stop composing their work entirely.
Ask us
If you want to know how a specific image on this site was made, write to us and we’ll tell you exactly, at support@maker-marketplace.com.