Ever heard of lying?

this is the turing test all over again: you can't actually tell whether it's handmade or made by a machine.

When I was in art school a guest professor fussed (nicely) at me about this lol She said I clearly had skill but I was making everything too precise and people like art specifically because it looks handmade

Robots can have hands. Checkmate

Etsy begs to differ.

You can, it's called lack of quality control.

Sweat shop's make handmade things. What is a machine?

Mass manufacturing has replaced handcrafting in pretty much every field. Its not economically vibable to handcraft when mass produced alternatives exist.

Crochet is a craft that is not automated. You could probably build a crochet machine, but it would be incredibly complicated, expensive, and doing so would be slower than a human. Its not a viable craft to automate.

There's a reason you don't see crochet clothes in stores. It takes dozens if not hundreds of hours to make a crochet garment. No one would spend thousands to pay me to handcraft a shirt over several weeks when they can buy a mass produced shirt for a fraction of the price at a store.

Hand crafting is great, as a hobby, or an act of love. Its a terrible idea as a profession outside of very niche cases. Few can afford to spend 10-100 times more for something that is hand crafted when similar alternatives exist.

Let's say that I start making hand made spoons in clay, and they become so popular that I no longer can keep up with the demand. I hire 10 other clay makers (I dunno if this is a term, but I guess you get it) and they learn to make these spoons like I do.

That allows me to focus on increasing my catalogue of hand made clay objects and now I have 10 different items I can sell and the demand explodes, so now I have 50 people sitting making hand made clay forms, and then a machine is mass producing spoons and other items, but each item have 50 unique variants, initially designed by me, and then later 50 employees created a form for a machine to produce.

Is it hand made or machine made? Technically it's machine made, but you'll most likely not meet another with an identical one.

My apologies for this comment, I am extremely bored and in physical pain, so this happened... And it probably doesn't make any sense to anyone but me.

Well yes but they obviously can and do pretend to be handmade. Worse yet they make AI videos of a person making a product, that looks similar to, and probably significantly better than the dropshipped mass produced crap that they actually ship out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_and_Crafts_movement