Can Artificial Intelligence Make Art?
This addresses the social perception of AI in creative domains, with incremental insights into human-robot differences in art evaluation.
The study investigated whether people perceive AI-created paintings as art and robots as artists, finding that robot paintings were judged as art similarly to human paintings, but robots were considered artists much less often due to reduced attribution of artistic intentions.
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 painting 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.