#39 - Say Hello to the "hi-mark", A Cultural Watermark Marking Human Intelligence

In today’s episode, I’m talking about a new symbol called the hi-mark — a small circle containing the letters “hi” for human intelligence. It’s designed to mark creative work that was conceived, developed and constructed by humans only.If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you’ll know this is a conversation I’ve been circling for months. In my article “ARTISTS IT’S TIME TO TAKE BACK YOUR POWER”, I wrote about the need to redefine and reclaim cultural language and start actively asserting the human in our work. The hi-mark feels like a practical extension of that impulse.What the hi-mark RepresentsThe symbol was developed by artist and activist Andrew Simonet (with Dima Al Ajouz). It’s open-source, freely available, and not legally enforceable. It’s not a trademark. It’s not a certification scheme. It’s a cultural gesture and the idea is simple: If a work was conceived, developed, and constructed entirely by human intelligence — you may choose to use the mark. If AI played a substantial role — you don’t.That’s it.There’s a line in Andrew’s framing that struck me — the idea that the human hand in art is not an inefficiency to be eliminated, but something essential and defining. The Hi-Mark is a way of drawing a circle and saying: inside this circle is embodied authorship born from human beings.As I’ve written before, the distinction is not always clean. Most digital creative tools now contain some level of machine learning. DAWs, plugins, editing software — AI is already in the room in subtle ways. Of course that’s different from typing a prompt into a generative platform and outsourcing composition entirely. But it does complicate the conversation.The Hi-Mark acknowledges that nuance. It suggests something practical - if the role AI played in your work is substantial enough that you would credit a human for it — then it doesn’t qualify for the hi-mark. So, will I be using it? Yes, definitely. I intend to start using the Hi-Mark on any and all work that qualifies, as a clear signal of authorship and as an invitation to conversation. It’s about resisting the quiet erasure of the human from cultural production and keeping visible the difference between a system trained on scraped data and a person with an actual living breathing nervous system.Links & Resources• Hi-Mark information and downloads• FAQ and usage guidelines• Online conversation (March 11) registration• My previous article on this topic: ARTISTS IT’S TIME TO TAKE BACK YOUR POWERIf you enjoyed this podcast please share it with a friend or consider leaving a review, it really helps me out. You can also support me by becoming a paid member on this channel for €5 per month on Substack and Patreon. And you can follow me on YouTube and Instagram. That’s all for now. Thanks for being here, and remember: Put humans first. Don’t feed the machine. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laurasheeran.substack.com/subscribe