The Influence of Creator Information on Preference for Artificial Intelligence- and Human-generated Artworks

Purpose: Researchers have shown that aesthetic judgments of artworks depend on contexts, such as the authenticity of an artwork (Newman & Bloom, 2011) and an artwork’s location of display (Kirk et al., 2009; Silveira et al., 2015). The present study aims to examine whether contextual information related to the creator, such as whether an artwork was created by a human or artificial intelligence (AI), influences viewers’ preference judgments of an artwork. Methods: Images of Impressionist landscape paintings were selected as human-made artworks. AI-made artwork stimuli were created using Google’s Deep Dream Generator by mimicking the Impressionist style via deep learning algorithms. Participants performed a preference rating task on each of the 108 artwork stimuli accompanied by one of the two creator labels. After this task, an art experience questionnaire (AEQ) was given to participants to examine whether individual differences in art experience influence their preference judgments. Results: Setting AEQ scores as a covariate in a two-way ANCOVA analysis, the stimuli with the human-made context were preferred over the stimuli with the AI-made context. Regarding the types of stimuli, the viewers preferred AI-made stimuli to human-made stimuli. There was no interaction effect between the two factors. Conclusion: These results suggest that preferences for visual artworks are influenced by the contextual information of the creator when the individual differences in art experience are controlled.