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Throughout history, art creation has been regarded as a uniquely human means to express original ideas, emotions, and experiences. However, as Generative Artificial Intelligence continues to change our visual, aesthetic, legal, and economic culture, important questions are emerging regarding the moral and aesthetic consequences of AI-generated art. Despite the increasing prevalence of AI tools in art production, their moral implications remain poorly understood. Examining moral judgments of AI-generated art is essential for understanding AI's impact on art production and its adherence to ethical and social norms. Across two pre-registered experiments combining explicit and implicit paradigms with Bayesian modelling, we investigate whether information about the AI system impacts moral and aesthetic judgments and whether human art is implicitly associated with positive attributes, while AI-generated art is associated with negative attributes. Experiment 1 revealed that information about AI backend processes in art led to reduced moral acceptability regarding gaining financial incentives, prestige, art status, and aesthetic appeal. Experiment 2 demonstrated that human-painted Impressionist Artworks were better recognised than their AI-generated counterparts. However, people did not reliably associate human-made art with positive attributes and AI-generated art with negative attributes in an implicit association task. These findings highlight that: (1) knowledge about AI systems shapes moral and aesthetic judgments, and (2) implicit associations between human-made art and AI-generated art and their perceived attributes are similar. This work deepens our understanding of people’s moral and aesthetic perceptions of AI-generated art, which are essential for unravelling the complexities of human-AI art interactions and their societal impact. The timeliness and relevance of this work is critical, as it captures a moment in our evolving relationship with AI, highlighting the importance of understanding these dynamics today.
Bara et al. (Mon,) studied this question.