Among the many possible applications AI can have, it is the artistic side of it, its capacity to perform creative, up-to-now human-exclusive tasks, that people are generally less confident on. In 2022, Roose (2022) brought to attention how AI art was already winning art prizes. As he reported, it was that same year that digital artist Jason M. Allen submitted “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” to Colorado’s State Fair’s annual art competition. The piece was entered under the name “Jason M. Allen via Midjourney”. Midjourney is an artificial intelligence that allows users to generate images, and this was disclosed by the artist when submitting the piece. It could be said that this episode marked the beginning of artificial intelligence gaining momentum and reaching the general public.
At the same time, many researchers have gotten their minds to work in order to design studies that analyze how we value art generated by AI. The results of many of these studies may potentially influence the future of marketing, design, and other fields closely related to art and where appealing to people’s psychology and perceptions is particularly important.
Throughout this series of articles the results of several of these studies will be explored in order to better understand how us humans perceive and value AI generated art.
Meijer’s Experiment: Online Art Gallery
Merel Meijer, MSc graduate in Marketing Management from the Rotterdam School of Management (Erasmus University), as part of her MSc research, decided to set up an online art gallery in order to find out how much consumers were willing to pay for art labelled as AI-generated, and understand how much of it has to do with perceived creativity (Meijer, 2024).
To achieve this goal, she arranged a quantitative survey with 248 participants using two pieces of art generated with the popular art AI DALL-E, with prompts that had also been created with ChatGPT. Participants were divided in two groups, one of which was aware that two artworks were created with AI, while the other one was not. Meijer tested for perceived creativity, the amount of money participants were willing to pay, their understanding of AI-generated art and their trust in AI.
Is AI Art Valued?
The result? Perceived value was significantly less for the group that was in the known, yet even so, about half of the participants from this group were willing to pay more than 200 €, while 20% of this half would have paid more than 500 €. As for perceived creativity, although it scored lower in the AI-labelled group, the researcher also found a positive relation between the understanding of how AI-made art works and the creativity perceived. That is, if this is properly conveyed, the audience will assign higher value to AI generated work. This is in line with the suggestions by Belaiche et al. (2023) we explored in a previous article. Thus, there is a need to develop, implement and improve communication strategies when using this kind of AI resource.
Although more research and experiments are needed in order to find the most adequate strategies, Meijer suggests emphasising the aesthetic qualities of artworks made through AI and explaining their creative processes, rather than just labelling the products as AI-generated.
This article belongs to the series ‘How do we perceive AI art?’.
References
Bellaiche, L., Shahi, R., Turpin, M. H., Ragnhildstveit, A., Sprockett, S., Barr, N., Christensen, A., & Seli, P. (2023). Humans versus AI: Whether and why we prefer human-created compared to AI-created artwork. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 8(1), 42. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-023-00499-6
Meijer, Merel. (2024, July 16). The influence of AI labeling on Art Valuation: Perceived Creativity as a mediator on Willingness-to-Pay (WTP). Marketing Management.Roose, K. (2022, September 2). AI-Generated Art Won a Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy. – The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html
