Studying Artist Sentiments around AI-generated Artwork
This work addresses the problem of understanding artist perspectives for inclusive tool development in the digital creativity industry, though it is incremental in scope.
The study investigated artists' mixed sentiments towards AI-generated art, identifying concerns about plagiarism and hopes for creative collaboration through interviews and social media analysis.
Art created using generated Artificial Intelligence has taken the world by storm and generated excitement for many digital creators and technologists. However, the reception and reaction from artists have been mixed. Concerns about plagiarizing their artworks and styles for datasets and uncertainty around the future of digital art sparked movements in artist communities shunning the use of AI for generating art and protecting artists' rights. Collaborating with these tools for novel creative use cases also sparked hope from some creators. Artists are an integral stakeholder in the rapidly evolving digital creativity industry and understanding their concerns and hopes inform responsible development and use of creativity support tools. In this work, we study artists' sentiments about AI-generated art. We interviewed 7 artists and analyzed public posts from artists on social media platforms Reddit, Twitter and Artstation. We report artists' main concerns and hopes around AI-generated artwork, informing a way forward for inclusive development of these tools.