We may often think that machines will never be able to match human creative talent. But are we capable of recognising their creativity and distinguishing it from our own?
A new study reveals that most people can’t actually tell the difference between an artwork created by a human being and one created by artificial intelligence.
While the notion of machine-based artistic creation isn’t especially new, the art market has seen growing interesting in works created by artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years.
One such work, a portrait titled ‘Edmond de Belamy’, sold for US$432,500 at Christie’s in 2018 – 45 times its estimated price.
According to Artnet News, this exceptional sale led Harsha Gangadharbatla to ponder how people perceive paintings and artworks created by artificial intelligence.
Previous research in the field has mostly focused on asking art specialists rather than everyday people.
The researcher set out to investigate, asking over 200 people recruited on Amazon to answer an online survey.
They had to distinguish between artworks created by AI and those created by human artists, namely Tom Bailey and Steve Johnson.
A majority of participants were only able to correctly identify one out of five landscape paintings created by AI. Over 75% of respondents guessed wrong for the other four.
When they did correctly identify an AI-crafted artwork, it was an abstract rather than a figurative composition.
“A number of factors go into the identification and evaluation of artwork, including the amount of time and effort that [people] perceive went into the creation of the artwork and surface-level indicators such as the presence of physical brushstrokes that gives artwork a hand-made quality.
Therefore, it is not surprising that the type of artwork has an influence on individuals’ evaluation of whether something is created by a human or a machine,” reads the study, recently published in the journal, Empirical Studies in the Arts.
While the study findings raise many questions about the future of artistic creation, Harsha Gangadharbatla is concerned about the use of artificial intelligence for commercial purposes.
“Artworks are harmless. They’re not trying to persuade you, but advertising is. If computers start producing persuasive messages and they’re put in front of people, what effect would that have?” he told Artnet News.