Bara Ionela, Ramsey Richard, Cross Emily S
Social Brain Sciences Group, Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Social Brain Sciences Group, Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; Neural Control of Movement Group, Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Cognition. 2025 Apr;257:106063. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106063. Epub 2025 Jan 16.
Throughout history, art creation has been regarded as a uniquely human means to express original ideas, emotions, and experiences. However, as Generative Artificial Intelligence reshapes visual, aesthetic, legal, and economic culture, critical questions arise about the moral and aesthetic implications of AI-generated art. Despite the growing use of AI tools in art, the moral impact of AI involvement in the art creation process remains underexplored. Understanding moral judgments of AI-generated art is essential for assessing AI's impact on art and its alignment with ethical norms. Across three pre-registered experiments combining explicit and implicit paradigms with Bayesian modelling, we examined how information about AI systems influences moral and aesthetic judgments and whether human art is implicitly associated with positive attributes compared to AI-generated art. Experiment 1 revealed that factual information about AI backend processes reduced moral acceptability and aesthetic appeal in certain contexts, such as gaining financial incentives and art status. Experiment 2 showed that additional information about AI art's success had no clear impact on moral judgments. Experiment 3 demonstrated that an implicit association task did not reliably link human art with positive attributes and AI art with negative ones. These findings show that factual information about AI systems shapes judgments, while different information doses about AI art's success have limited moral impact. Additionally, implicit associations between human-made and AI-generated art are similar. This work enhances understanding of moral and aesthetic perceptions of AI-generated art, emphasizing the importance of examining human-AI interactions in an arts context, and their current and evolving societal implications.
纵观历史，艺术创作一直被视为人类独特的表达原创思想、情感和经历的方式。然而，随着生成式人工智能重塑视觉、审美、法律和经济文化，关于人工智能生成的艺术的道德和审美影响出现了关键问题。尽管人工智能工具在艺术领域的使用越来越广泛，但人工智能参与艺术创作过程的道德影响仍未得到充分探索。理解对人工智能生成的艺术的道德判断对于评估人工智能对艺术的影响及其与道德规范的一致性至关重要。通过结合明确和隐含范式与贝叶斯建模的三个预先注册的实验，我们研究了关于人工智能系统的信息如何影响道德和审美判断，以及与人工智能生成的艺术相比，人类艺术是否隐含地与积极属性相关联。实验1表明，关于人工智能后端过程的事实信息在某些情况下会降低道德可接受性和审美吸引力，比如获得经济激励和艺术地位。实验2表明，关于人工智能艺术成功的额外信息对道德判断没有明显影响。实验3表明，一个隐含联想任务并不能可靠地将人类艺术与积极属性联系起来，也不能将人工智能艺术与消极属性联系起来。这些发现表明，关于人工智能系统的事实信息会影响判断，而关于人工智能艺术成功的不同信息量的道德影响有限。此外，人类创作的艺术和人工智能生成的艺术之间的隐含联想是相似的。这项工作增进了对人工智能生成的艺术的道德和审美认知的理解，强调了在艺术背景下审视人类与人工智能互动的重要性，以及它们当前和不断演变的社会影响。
