Co-creating art with generative artificial intelligence: Implications for artworks and artists

Synthetic visual art is becoming a commodity due to generative artificial intelligence (AI). The trend of using AI for co-creation will not spare artists’ creative processes, and it is important to understand how the use of generative AI at different stages of the creative process affects both the evaluation of the artist and the result of the human-machine collaboration (i.e., the visual artifact). In three experiments (N = 560), this research explores how the evaluation of artworks is transformed by the revelation that the artist collaborated with AI at different stages of the creative process. The results show that co-created art is less liked and recognized, especially when AI was used in the implementation stage. While co-created art is perceived as more novel, it lacks creative authenticity, which exerts a dominant influence. The results also show that artists’ perceptions suffer from the co-creation process, and that artists who co-create are less admired because they are perceived as less authentic. Two boundary conditions are identified. The negative effect can be mitigated by disclosing the level of artist involvement in co-creation with AI (e.g., by training the algorithm on a curated set of images vs. simply prompting an off-the-shelf AI image generator). In the context of art that is perceived as commercially motivated (e.g., stock images), the effect is also diminished. This research has important implications for the literature on human-AI-collaboration, research on authenticity, and the ongoing policy debate regarding the transparency of algorithmic presence.