What Is the Value of AI-Involved Art? Evidence From a Juried In-Person Exhibition

Wisdom Obinna, Hexuan Wang, Cecile Duncan, Kristelia Garcia, Nina Grgić-Hlača +2

What is the value of AI-involved art, and to whom does it belong? We begin to answer these questions using data from an in-person, juried AI art exhibition. Our study involved artists, lawyers, and computer scientists (N=209) as either creators or evaluators of AI-involved artworks. We found that nearly half of evaluators reported willingness to buy an artwork, with pricing correlating with perceived artistic value---creativity and visual appeal---as well as the effort necessary to create it. In contrast, three-quarters of creators reported willingness to sell at prices correlating only with effort rather than artistic value. Both groups viewed prompting users and AI developers as deserving rewards and rights, leaving training data artists behind. Disciplinary training shaped these views: participants with legal training favored distributed reward models. These findings have implications for future research on human-AI creative collaboration and policy debates regarding AI-involved works.