Unlimited Editions: Documenting Human Style in AI Art Generation
This reframing addresses the problem of preserving human creative processes in AI art for researchers and artists, though it is incremental as it builds on existing HCI concepts.
The paper argues that current HCI research on AI art generation misunderstands artistic value by focusing on detection and automation, and proposes that HCI should instead develop ways to document the origins and evolution of artistic style in AI-generated art.
As AI art generation becomes increasingly sophisticated, HCI research has focused primarily on questions of detection, authenticity, and automation. This paper argues that such approaches fundamentally misunderstand how artistic value emerges from the concerns that drive human image production. Through examination of historical precedents, we demonstrate that artistic style is not only visual appearance but the resolution of creative struggle, as artists wrestle with influence and technical constraints to develop unique ways of seeing. Current AI systems flatten these human choices into reproducible patterns without preserving their provenance. We propose that HCI's role lies not only in perfecting visual output, but in developing means to document the origins and evolution of artistic style as it appears within generated visual traces. This reframing suggests new technical directions for HCI research in generative AI, focused on automatic documentation of stylistic lineage and creative choice rather than simple reproduction of aesthetic effects.