Review: ArtHelper - The All-In-One AI Writing + Marketing Assistant for Artists - 'ChatGPT for Artists'

ArtHelper prides itself on being all 'human-made' art.

The idea of an AI, trained specifically on art business marketing, that can not only offer advice on marketing your work, but also assist with creating all the content too, is certainly appealing. Especially to those of us who would rather spend more time creating our art than trying to sell it.

ArtHelper does just that whilst attempting to be your 'home' on the internet. A destination for your profile and portfolio, a marketplace for your art, and a directory of artists as well, with one distinction - all the art must be human made.

Which, for you AI artists, doesn't count the prompt for AI generated art - because the idea, according to ArtHelper's creators, isn't the art. Which is a fair point, in terms of promoting art 'made by a human', but can get kind of murky when you understand that not all AI art is generated from a single prompt... and 'found object art' isn't actually 'created' by the artist who 'found' it either.

However, ArtHelper's creators have drawn a line, and give you the paid option of your art being verified as 'human made' for a monthly fee (which seems like a separate fee on top of their paid plans as none mention this is included in the price?). They also guarantee that none of your uploaded art will be used to train an AI for image generation.

Thus far I have been using the free forever plan that gives you access to their AI assistant, and some limited features, including profile page, portfolio, and a limited monthly allowance of Sparks credits (Sparks are automated marketing tasks you can run to save you time creating content like social media posts etc.).

The free plan is quite good value. While it doesn't have quite as much automation as the paid plans, it can still go a long way to helping you develop your marketing materials that you may already be creating manually through other methods.

That said, the AI does come up with a lot of 'waffle' if you ask it to write copy on your behalf about your artworks. For example, I had it write a blog post about one of my cat artworks titled 'Cat Amongst the Pigeons'. Based on just that image, it related my thoughts, what I liked, and was trying to do with the artwork. That would all be great, if any of it was true. You can see the first couple of paragraphs in the image below (click on the image to enlarge).

A sample draft blog post, by ArtHelper, based on nothing but the artwork itself.
As the artist, it comes across, to me, as an art critic who is so sure of themselves they
know exactly what the artist was thinking - even after the artist has said
'Not even close!' 

Admittedly, it's a first draft, and you can edit it, but when the entire thing isn't true, what's the point of automation? Here is an extract, a few paragraphs further in on the same blog post:

A little backstory, I painted this after watching a real-life standoff on a chilly morning — a tabby posing like it owned the pavement, and two pigeons treating it like a slightly eccentric lamppost. The real-life moment lasted about 30 seconds; the painting gets to keep the drama forever. I signed it TET Feb 2023, because even fleeting moments deserve a timestamp.

None of that backstory happened... and I sign and date all my paintings, as part of the art, so I know when I painted them. 

ArtHelper's blog post is almost all waffle. At best it's a good template structure for you to replace the waffle with what you were actually trying to achieve and what the real inspirations were. I definitely wouldn't want to leave ArtHelper on full autopilot, posting a narrative of some other artist's life, because it certainly isn't mine.

You can 'tune' the AI to write more like you but whether that reduces the 'waffle' remains to be seen.

[FYI: If you are interested in the backstory to this artwork... I have a photographic essay book called 'Cats in the Sun' by Hans Silvester that features the semi domestic cats of the Cycladic Islands. On page 78 there is an image of a lone cat approaching a group (flock?) of pigeons in a flat paved area, possibly very early morning? I thought, 'I've never painted a cat watching a pigeon before.' Within three sketches I came up with this composition. Not as 'colorful' a backstory, and I wish I had access to many real cats for inspiration.]

That aside, ArtHelper also generated a selection of images showing the artwork hung in various locations, and chose relevant keywords and tags you may like to use.

I'm not trying to discredit ArtHelper for rejecting AI art but embracing AI writing (and product imagery). Honestly, if you can find a market for AI images (and there certainly is), this would be really useful for you too. You just maybe will want to keep your images and profile private on ArtHelper's own site.

Personally, what I'm finding most useful on ArtHelper is just chatting to the AI Assistant. ArtHelper's creators say:

Our model is trained on $100M+ in art sales and over a decade of artist marketing expertise from 50,000+ art businesses.

I don't know the 'ethics' behind how their model was trained (was all that data from public information etc.?) but it has to be better than talking to a general purpose AI model like ChatGPT right?

I've been bouncing ideas with the AI Assistant for how to get my RedBubble print store more profitable, as that is part of my business model, selling prints of my original cat paintings. If you know anything about cats and the internet, it's a very competitive field - particularly in art and design.

The assistant has made useful suggestions in how to organise my store, as well as how to make my work more marketable by creating a narrative and recurring cat characters being featured etc.

Although I haven't seen any boost in sales so far (it is still early days to be fair) it has helped me to be more clear and focused with how I want to sell my cat artworks.

The only real negative I've encountered is, currently the assistant cannot 'see' external links and websites. It will tell you, initially it can, but then when you include links, as it requested for my store, it does not use them. It did say uploading a screenshot of my store would help but it didn't use that either. Everything it suggested was based upon what it knows about RedBubble stores already.

Also be careful when you upload images for discussion with the assistant. All my images uploaded into the chat ended up in my public gallery. I didn't know this was happening. It was days later when I removed them.

Overall ArtHelper has a lot of potential and is well worth exploring if you're hoping to turn your art into a side hustle or full time career. Particularly if you want assistance with the business and marketing side and need someone to bounce your thoughts off. A free AI art business specialist model is a great starting point to help you focus your ideas.

I do understand the whole 'human-made' angle but there's no reason you couldn't allow AI artists to use these tools too. Just have a check box that puts them in a separate directory and marketplace (or at least stops them from being listed in the 'human-made' community areas in the short term).

No one really needs the discourse of people arguing over whether AI Art is art (if a blank canvas can be art... just sayin'). Get on with whatever art you enjoy creating and stop gatekeeping other people.

Mini rant over. If you're not opposed to AI taking the jobs of Art Business Consultants, Mentors and Copywriters but are opposed to AI making Art, then ArtHelper is the site for you. (I'm joking, I think it's a really useful site, and I appreciate the free forever tier to get you started).