> How do you know it's a person on the other end? Would you even see a difference if you had a computer generate that art?

Unless AI companies already developed and launched plugins/extensions for people to do something that looks like hand drawn sketches inside of Clip Studio, and suddenly got a lot better at understanding prompts (including having inspiration of their own), then I'm pretty sure it's a human.

I don't think I'd get to see in-progress sketches and it wouldn't be as good at understanding what I wanted to have had changes then. I've used various generative AI image generators (latest one Qwen Image 2511 and a whole bunch of others) and none of them, including with "prompt enhancements" can take very vague descriptions of "I want it to feel like X" or "I'm not sure about Y but something like Z" and turn it into something that looks acceptable. At least not yet.

And because I've spent a lot of time with various generative image making processes and models, I'm fairly confident I'd recognize if that was what was happening.

Sure, it's true today. Entertain the hypothetical though because this is what the trillion dollar rush is aspiring to do in the near future. We should be thinking about our answers now.

Answers to what? Do I care what tools the artist use as long I get the results I want? I don't understand what you see as the issue, that I somehow think I'd be working with a human but it was a machine?

A deceit isn't the issue. The issue is that person you're paying is going to be undercut this year by machines, along with probably 100M other people selling their labor.