Human Creativity Versus Artificial Intelligence: Source Attribution, Observer Attitudes, and Eye Movements while Viewing Visual Art

Caitlin V. Cunningham Gabriel Radvansky James R. Brockmole ^*

• Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, United States

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the capability to create visual images with minimal human input, a technology that is being applied to many areas of daily life. However, the products of AI are consistently judged to be worse than human-created art. The current work sought to determine if these explicit biases are accompanied by shifts in the way people visually interrogate artworks. Participants’ eye movements were recorded while viewing artworks created by the AI tool DALL-E 2 that depicted people and events described in the Bible. Participants in the human attribution group were told prior to viewing that the pieces were created by art students, while participants in the AI attribution group were told the pieces were created by AI. Participants were surveyed after viewing to ascertain their opinions on the quality and artistic merit of the pieces. Replicating prior work, participants’ subjective opinions of the artworks were more positive when they believed pieces were created by humans as opposed to AI. However, gaze patterns did not differ between groups. Gaze was also unassociated with a variety of individual differences among participants, including religiosity and attitudes toward aesthetics and AI. Collectively, these results suggest that the pace, spatial extent, and cognitive effort needed to acquire meaning from artworks are independent of a person’s explicit “valuation” of those artworks.