Threadlore · Notes · Disclosure

Can I Use AI to Design Custom T-Shirts?

Yes — with limits, and with disclosure. This page is our answer to that question and our own disclosure at the same time, because we would rather you read where we use AI than guess. Nothing below is a marketing position; it is the standing rule the shop is run by.

Where AI is used in a Threadlore shirt

• Concept and layout. Working out what a design should be, how the front and back should sit together, and which of a dozen directions is worth drawing. This is AI-assisted under human direction — a person sets the brief, judges the output, and rejects most of it.
• Research support. Assembling the source material behind a story before a human checks it. The facts on our shirts are verified against real sources, not accepted because a model produced them.

Where AI is not used — and these are hard rules

• Type is never drawn by a model. Every word on a Threadlore shirt is set with a real font engine. This is the single biggest quality failure in AI-generated merchandise: image models draw the shape of letters instead of typesetting them, which is why so many generated shirts carry warped, melted or nonsense words. If you can read it cleanly at arm's length, a font engine set it.
• No trademarks, logos or sports marks. Not reproduced, not "inspired by", not stylised. A design that reproduces someone else's mark is their property, and a listing built on one can be removed without warning.
• No real-person likenesses. No celebrity faces, no lookalike portraits of living people.
• No passing it off as hand-drawn. We do not claim hand-illustration we did not do. That is what this page exists to prevent.

The line we carry on our listings

Original design. Concept and layout are AI-assisted under human direction; all type is set with a real font engine, never model-drawn. No trademarks, logos, sports marks or real-person likenesses are used. Printed to order by our production partner.

What the platforms actually require

Etsy's Creativity Standards govern this, and the widely reported position as of 2026 is that the policy regulates disclosure rather than banning AI: sellers are expected to declare when an item was created or materially assisted by AI, to describe their own role in making it accurately in the item's details, and to name production partners. Reported enforcement has been active rather than theoretical, with listings removed for undisclosed or mis-declared AI use. We link Etsy's policy page rather than paraphrase it as gospel — read the live page for the authoritative wording, since platform policy moves faster than any shop's FAQ.

Stated plainly because it matters: the specific enforcement figures circulating in seller coverage are second-hand reporting, not something we have verified. The policy page linked above is the primary source.

How to check any AI-assisted design before you buy

1. Read the text on the shirt. Warped, melted, duplicated or nonsense letterforms mean the words were generated rather than set. This is the fastest tell there is, and it never gets better in the printed garment.
2. Zoom the small details. Smeared insignia, hands with the wrong number of fingers, objects that should be symmetrical and are not — generation artefacts survive into print at full size.
3. Read the description for a subject. A wall of search keywords with no explanation of what the design is signals a bulk uploader. A real design has something to say about itself.
4. Look for borrowed marks. A real logo, team crest, franchise character or celebrity face means you are buying somebody else's property, whatever tool drew it.

Can you use your own designs on print-on-demand platforms?

Yes — uploading your own artwork is how print-on-demand is meant to work, and you keep the rights to art you created. The limits are the obvious ones: you cannot upload work whose rights you do not hold, whether that is stock art used outside its licence, another designer's file, a trademark, or a real person's likeness. And on Etsy specifically, the standards turn on whether you directed the creative work yourself rather than running someone else's bought prompts through a generator.

Why we publish this at all

Because the alternative is worse for everyone. Disclosure is a compliance obligation, but a shop that will tell you exactly which parts of its process are machine-assisted is also telling you it has a process — a brief, a human judgement, a typesetting step, a rights check. A shop that says nothing has told you nothing. That is the whole argument.