My youngest daughter is a fine arts major, deeply immersed in her training to become an animator. She is incensed at the intrusion of AI into her domain, and hasn’t been shy about letting me know that.
She isn’t the only one, of course; the entire motion picture industry is grinding to a halt over, among other things, the prospect of AI coming in and writing scripts and even replacing live actors. AI is essentially intruding into a domain that we humans thought we had all to ourselves: creativity.
Lucas Bellaiche and his team at Duke University took up the question in a study recently published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. “Humans versus AI: whether and why we prefer human-created compared to AI-created artwork” addresses that question directly, delivering an unsurprising answer: yes, we prefer human-generated art.
As a rule, most people view art as a distinctly human thing, given its role in our emotional expression and its place in our narratives. Both privately and collectively, we value art because we see within it our own reflection. There’s a passive assumption embedded in those emotions that, well, art belongs to us.
And now AI is challenging that assumption with its ability to create perfectly serviceable art, for a wide range of purposes, at the touch of a button.
“The topic is interesting because it shows the massive developments of AI in recent years,” Bellaiche told PsyPost, “but what I am personally most interested in is actually the opportunity to explore what “creativity” even means to the layperson: is it a form of cognition that can be achieved by anything (including AI), or is it reserved for humans only, as a sort of valued anthropocentrism? What factors of creativity (in this case, art specifically) can be achieved by AI as compared to humans?”
The study included 149 participants who rated artwork they were presented with in terms of liking, beauty, profundity, and worth. There were 30 pieces of this artwork, each tagged either “human-created” or “AI-created”. In fact, all of the art was AI-created, so the pro-human bias was clearly being triggered by the tag. The bias held firm over all four of the study criteria.
Bellaiche listed two takeaways.
“Firstly, we reinforce that art serves two purposes: The first function is the very surface-level enjoyment of art afforded through the senses – the visual (or auditory, for music) properties can be pretty, ugly, symmetrical, etc, and we respond to that by simple ‘liking’ or judgements of ‘beauty.’ The second function is more complex: art serves as a communicative medium from artist to audience. What does the art tell us? Is there a deeper meaning besides what we simply see/hear? What emotion is being conveyed?
“Secondly, importantly, art presumed to be by AI seems to do well on this first function (judgements of simple “liking” and “beauty” are nearly equal to art presumed to be by humans; i.e., AI can indeed make a pretty picture), but not so much on the second function.
“That is, the average person does not believe AI, compared to humans, to be able to communicate deep meaning very well through art, like emotions, narratives, worth, or profundity. Arguably, for people that are anti-AI, this should come as a relief, in that communicative properties of art will seemingly be reserved for the human and human only, on average.”
My daughter, then, can indulge in a feeling of relief: most people, it would seem, would rather see her work than that of a computer. For now, at least, AI-generated art is nothing more than a convenience, rendered to innocuous ends; the human product is what has value in the eye of the beholder.
Capitalists will not see it this way, of course, and it remains possible – even probable – that this might someday change.
But not today.
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