By Wang Huanchao, Senior Researcher, Tencent Research Institute

In June 2025, I traveled to Georgia, a small country in the South Caucasus. At a market in Tbilisi, I came across a painting the size of a palm. It was priced at 300 lari, roughly 800 RMB. The vendor was a woman in her fifties. It was unclear whether the painting was her own work. Part of the reason was that she did not fit the stereotypical image of an artist; another was that her stall also displayed more than a dozen clearly mass-printed works, including The Smile of Mona Lisa, priced between 30 and 80 lari.

The comparison at that stall is revealing. It suggests a phenomenon: once the production of art becomes thoroughly industrialized, works that embed human labor and creative judgment begin to command an automatic premium. A similar pattern has emerged in recent years alongside the rise of AI. It points to an economic development that is taking shape but has yet to be fully named in Chinese discourse: the Human-Made Premium—what we may call the “Human Premium.”

1. The Economics of Aura

The Human Premium describes a simple market behavior: when consumers are certain that a product, work, or service is created by a human, they are willing to pay more for it. This premium does not stem from measurable differences in quality, but from the perceived value of “humanness” as a scarce attribute.

From late 2025 to early 2026, this idea began to appear frequently in technology commentary, business analysis, and academic research. A report by the AI application platform MindStudio defined it as a structural consequence of generative AI reshaping the supply side of creative markets. A paper published in the MIS Quarterly confirmed the existence of an “algorithm discount”: when consumers learn that a digital product is generated by an algorithm rather than a human, their valuation of it declines systematically.

In December 2025, Merriam-Webster selected “Slop”—a term referring to low-quality AI-generated content—as its word of the year. CNN reported that the choice reflected growing public unease toward AI-generated content.

Together, these signals point to a form of value reconfiguration specific to the AI era. The shift is not driven by humans outperforming machines, but by the fact that “made by humans” itself has become a scarce attribute requiring authentication.

This is not the first time such a reversal has occurred. The Second Industrial Revolution enabled mass machine production, driving down the cost of textiles, furniture, and everyday goods. In 1861, British designer William Morris founded a decorative arts firm and argued that people should be surrounded by beautiful, carefully made objects. His ideas helped spark the Arts and Crafts movement across Britain and the United States. As machines made production cheap, handcrafted goods gained a new basis for premium pricing.

In 1935, Walter Benjamin introduced the concept of “aura” in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He argued that artworks derive their uniqueness from their presence in a specific time and place. A painting is powerful because it exists here and now—it is this object in front of you, not any reproduction. That irreproducible presence is its aura.

Photography and film made reproduction limitless, and aura, in his view, began to fade. Benjamin saw this as a democratizing force: when art becomes widely accessible through reproduction, its aura dissolves in favor of equality.

Yet ninety years later, generative AI has pushed the question into territory Benjamin did not anticipate. AI does not merely reproduce existing works; it generates new ones at near-zero marginal cost. A series of papers published in AI & Society in 2025 extends Benjamin’s framework into the AI era. Researchers suggest that AI-generated art occupies a hybrid space: neither reproduction nor aura-bearing creation, but something closer to synthesis.

In contrast, human-made works gain renewed aura precisely because they exist within a flood of synthetic output. When generation becomes abundant, aura is no longer purely aesthetic—it becomes economic. It becomes the source of premium pricing.

When technology pushes the cost of producing something toward zero, its economic value collapses. What remains—what the technology cannot replicate—acquires premium value. Just as industrialization revived the value of craftsmanship, AI is reviving the premium attached to human creation.

2. Certification, Platforms, and Price Signals

Between 2025 and 2026, several developments turned the Human Premium from intuition into observable market behavior.

Among all industries, publishing was the first to formalize it. On January 29, 2025, the Authors Guild in the United States launched a “Human Authored” certification program. Any author publishing in the U.S. can pay a $10 fee per book, verify identity, and sign a licensing agreement to display a badge with a unique ID on the cover. The ID is recorded in a public database.

The badge serves a single purpose: to signal that the book originates from human cognition. In March 2026, the program was extended to all non-member authors and publishers.

Its significance lies in infrastructure. It provides a readable label, a searchable database, and an enforceable verification mechanism. Together, these elements form a micro-certification system structurally similar to organic food labels or diamond grading certificates.

Importantly, the certification does not prohibit the use of AI for grammar correction, spelling, or research assistance. Its boundary is narrower: the core expressive act must be human. It is not anti-technology; rather, it defines an economic boundary within human-machine collaboration. The premium attaches to human creative judgment, not to all human labor.

Substack offers another case study. By April 2026, the platform surpassed 50 million active subscriptions, including 5 million paid subscriptions. Total creator revenue exceeded $450 million annually.

A platform built on human writers should, in theory, have struggled in an AI-saturated environment. The data shows the opposite. Forty-five creator channels have more than 500,000 subscribers, and over 50 earn more than $1 million annually.

A 2025 Substack survey of over 2,000 writers found that 45% use AI tools, primarily for editing and research. The more important finding, however, is that writers who do not use AI-generated content outperform others in subscription growth and retention.

Rachel Maron, who authored the report, attributes this directly to the Human Premium: readers are not subscribing to content alone, but to specific individuals. When marginal production cost approaches zero, the only non-replicable input becomes the writer themselves.

3. The Boundaries of Premium

To understand the full picture, one point must be clear: the Human Premium is not a universal benefit. It is a mechanism through which value concentrates after scarcity is redistributed.

A December 2024 report by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers estimated that the generative AI content market will reach €64 billion by 2028. At the same time, human creators in music and audiovisual industries face an estimated €22 billion in cumulative income risk. Music creators face a 24% income decline; audiovisual creators 21%.

A February 2026 report by Ramp Economics Lab, based on corporate payment data, found that enterprise spending on freelance platforms fell from 0.66% in Q4 2021 to 0.14% in Q3 2025. Over the same period, spending on AI service providers rose from near zero to 2.85%.

Not all human creation receives a premium. Most substitution occurs in intermediate layers of labor. The premium is concentrated among individuals with established personal brands, recognizable style, and verifiable reputation.

Fewer than 0.1% of Substack writers earn more than $1 million annually. Yet this small group captures the majority of the Human Premium dividend.

This mechanism carries at least three structural risks.

The same structure is now emerging in information markets. As high-quality human judgment moves behind paywalls, the free information layer risks being saturated with synthetic content.

The Human Premium ultimately follows a simple economic logic: when a technology makes something abundant and cheap, the human-originated version is re-priced upward.

But this revaluation is still in its early phase. It forces a more fundamental question:

In a world where machines can generate nearly everything, where does the irreducible value of human creation actually reside?

The answer may not be that humans do it better. It may be that it is done by humans at all.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions