At a glance
- The threshold: Visual work must meet VH3 (Human-Led, AI-Assisted) or above to carry the VerifiedHuman mark.
- The question: Who created it? Consider who captured, created, and arranged the essential visual elements.
- Technical assistance: Color correction, exposure adjustment, image editing, and CAD tools can support your work. The creative work remains yours.
- AI-generated material: At VH3, you must substantially transform it. A prompted image with minor edits does not establish human creation.
- The Capture or Arrangement Principle: Examine essential AI-generated elements that remain unchanged in the final work.
- Uncertain origins: Add the AIU (AI-Unknown) tag when the human or AI origin of source material is unclear.
Essential Creation
A photographer chooses a subject, a frame, and a moment. A painter works with line, color, and form. Designers, filmmakers, and other visual artists make related choices in different media.
Those choices bring visual elements together into work that someone can see or experience. Essential creation asks who made them.
Who created it? Apply the question to the whole work and to its essential components. When you capture or create visual elements and arrange them into a work, you are its essential creator. When AI generates the elements and composition, a prompt alone does not make that image your creation.
The medium can change. A work may be a physical object, a digital image, a photograph, or a design transferred to paper. The question of creation remains.
Back to topThe Capture or Arrangement Principle
Using a visual element does not mean you created that element. It may have been made by another person or generated by a system.
The Capture or Arrangement Principle is a gut-check: if AI generated essential visual elements that remain unchanged in your final work, that is a sign you have not transformed the material.
Look at the work and its components. What did you capture or create? What did AI generate? How did your own decisions transform the result?
Did you create it, or did AI create it?
Back to topWhen the source is uncertain
Found images, textures, or patterns sometimes arrive without a clear account of how they were made. You may also suspect AI involvement without knowing its extent.
When the human or AI origin of material you use is uncertain, add AIU (AI-Unknown) to your VH level, for example, VH4-AIU. The tag identifies that uncertainty. Apply the same questions about your own creation and transformation of the work.
Back to topGo deeper.
Open the explanations, examples, and terms you need.
Human creation and AI
The human role behind the standard.
Audiences deserve to know who created the work they are looking at. VerifiedHuman certifies human creation through a shared standard and the artist’s commitment to it.
Visual tools can help you develop an idea, refine an image, or prepare a finished work. The standard distinguishes that assistance from having a system generate the essential visual work.
There is room to experiment. An artist might make one piece from intentionally recombined AI imagery and create the next through photography, painting, or drawing. Membership leaves room for both. Use the mark on work that meets the standard.
Back to topWhich level describes your work?
From entirely AI-generated to entirely human.
The Human–AI Spectrum has five levels. Visual work at VH3, VH4, or VH5 qualifies for the VerifiedHuman mark.
VH5 · Entirely Human-Created
- You capture or create all visual elements without generative AI.
- Traditional tools for color correction, exposure adjustment, image editing, and CAD are fine.
- The work reflects your vision, perspective, and creative decisions.
VH4 · Human-Created, AI-Enhanced
- You capture or create all visual elements.
- Generative AI may help with research, reference gathering, written briefs, and technical documentation.
- You make the visual and creative decisions. AI supports the workflow without generating the visual content.
VH3 · Human-Led, AI-Assisted
- You lead the creative process and substantially transform any AI-generated material you use.
- AI may supply reference images, variations, or components. Your work must go beyond minor edits to that output.
- The finished work reflects your vision and creative choices. Use the Capture or Arrangement Principle to examine what you have transformed.
Work below VH3 does not qualify for the VerifiedHuman mark.
See the complete Human–AI Spectrum
Back to topUsing AI in visual work
How the standard applies to AI assistance.
You are responsible for judging whether your work meets the standard. Look at what the tool contributed and what you created.
Technical enhancement
AI may help correct color, resize an image, reduce noise, or repair technical defects in work you captured or created. These processes can improve a work while leaving its essential creation with you.
Applying a style
A style filter applied to your own image needs closer consideration. Styles carry visual choices and may draw on another artist’s sensibility. Ask whether the tool enhances your work or supplies the visual treatment that defines it.
Who should be credited for the result? Use the Capture or Arrangement Principle to examine where the essential creation lies.
Reworking an AI-generated image
AI can provide an initial model or draft. At VH3, you must substantially transform the material into work that reflects your own visual choices. Personalizing an output or giving it a new context does not, by itself, settle who created the image.
Generating an image from a prompt and making minor edits does not qualify. If AI assembled its essential visual elements and composition, AI created that image.
Back to topAI assistance in practice
A closer look at a real creative decision.
A photograph with technical enhancement
Maria photographs a sunset over the ocean. She chooses the viewpoint, frames the scene, and captures the image. In post-production, she uses AI tools to adjust exposure and white balance, remove sensor dust spots, enhance colors within their natural range, and sharpen foreground detail.
Maria remains the essential creator. She captured and arranged the visual elements. The tools improved the photograph without generating the scene or composition.
This example falls within VH4–VH5, depending on the tools used. Traditional processing without generative AI is consistent with VH5. Generative AI assistance must be assessed under the level descriptions above.
Back to topTerms used in the standard
The language used in the commitment.
- Visual artist
- The creator of visual work.
- Visual work
- Visual elements selected and arranged in a medium to be viewed or experienced.
- Essentially created
- Created through a person’s capture or arrangement of visual elements. The central question is: Who created it?
- Essential visual elements
- Lines, shapes, tones, colors, patterns, textures, and forms, as well as light, space, angle, and composition.
- Image generation model
- An AI system trained on images that generates new visual content in response to prompts.
- Standard
- A statement of commitment to specific creative practices.
- Represent
- Claim, present, or share work as your own.
- Team
- A group of people working together.
- Intellectual property
- Creative work to which someone has legal rights, such as copyright or trademark.
- Essential
- The fundamental elements or characteristics of something.
- Human
- A person, or something originating from a person.
- Generative AI
- AI systems trained on existing content that generate new text, images, audio, code, or video in response to prompts.
- Machine learning
- Algorithms that learn from data to make predictions or generate content.
- Other generative processes
- Other AI or machine-learning processes that create new content.
- Artificial intelligence (AI)
- A field of computer science concerned with systems that perform tasks such as learning, reasoning, and generating content.
- AIU (AI-Unknown)
- A tag added to a VH level when the human or AI origin of source material is uncertain.