Can Artificial Intelligence Make Art?: Folk Intuitions as to whether AI-driven Robots Can Be Viewed as Artists and Produce Art

Abstract

In two experiments (total N=693) we explored whether people are willing to consider paintings made by AI-driven robots as art, and robots as artists. Across the two experiments, we manipulated three factors: (i) agent type (AI-driven robot v. human agent), (ii) behavior type (intentional creation of a painting v. accidental creation), and (iii) object type (abstract v. representational painting). We found that people judge robot paintings and human paintings as art to roughly the same extent. However, people are much less willing to consider robots as artists than humans, which is partially explained by the fact that they are less disposed to attribute artistic intentions to robots.

Humans vs. AI: Whether and why we prefer human-created compared to AI-created artwork

“…Critically, however, other studies have yielded results that are at odds with those from the aforementioned studies, finding little-to-no differences in evaluations of human-and AI-created artworks (Israfilzade, 2020;Hong & Curran, 2019;Xu et al, 2020). Additionally, though not an explicit investigation of aesthetic-judgements, per se, one study found that participants were equally likely to consider hypothetical products created by human and AI artists' as "art" (Mikalonytė & Kneer, 2022). Put differently, people did not tend to perceive AI artists' hypothetical products as being lesser than human artists' hypothetical products.…”

Is AI Art Another Industrial Revolution in the Making?

“…The current literature on human attitudes towards AIgenerated art presents some evidence as to what people might feel of this shift in viewpoint. In two recent studies (Hong and Curran 2019;Mikalonyt 2022) on attitudes towards artwork produced by humans versus by artificial intelligence, researchers found that while most test subjects felt that AI-generated art could be considered "art," they were much less inclined to consider the art to be produced by an "artist". This is a significant distinction because it implies that while artwork contains artistic value just by existing, artwork is not made just by putting pen to paper.…”

“…In shifting the question from the object to the characteristic identity, we come to a yet unsolved question about AI art: If artwork generated by AI can be called "art", but the model is arguably not an "artist," then who is the author of such a piece? Mikalonyte and Kneer posit that this question has not yet been solved, suggesting that the lack of answer is reflected in the fact that autonomously generated AI artwork has yet to be copyrighted, with proposals to give copyright to the human designers of the artificial intelligence, as well as to redefine "authorship" so as to include robots in the definition (Mikalonyt 2022).…”

A Proposed Meta-Reality Immersive Development Pipeline: Generative AI Models and Extended Reality (XR) Content for the Metaverse

“…An exciting aspect about using AI is its ability to improve and learn from previous versions. Artists are using these generated images to inspire them and as starting points for conceptualizing ideas and designs, and many speculate it will not be long before AI can do the largest part of concept design work [3].…”

“…The infancy of art history computing can be traced to the 1980s as artists experimented with the potential of "digitized" and "digital" iterations of algorithmic art [2]. As art and design have historically adopted emerging technologies, the rapid spread of AI art generators available today was inevitable [3]. However, such generative content produced using text prompts with DALLE-2, Midjourney, Jasper Art, Stable Diffusion, DeepAI, and many more tools, has been largely limited to two-dimensional output and has yet to disrupt the 3D modeling and digital twin development pipelines [4].…”