AI-Generated Images Raise Age-Old Question: What Is Art?

When Midjourney's AI-generated image “Théâtre D'opéra Spatial” won first place at the Colorado State Fair's digital arts competition in 2022, it set off a firestorm. Was this a watershed moment in art history or an ominous sign for the future of creative work?

As the knowledge economy continues to grow, creative, cutting-edge ideas are increasingly in demand. It’s no surprise that as generative-AI tools become more sophisticated and accessible, knowledge workers are looking to use them in their creative processes.

But as AI blurs the lines between human-made and AI-generated creative output — images such as logos, product designs, or website content — it raises important questions: What counts as “real” creative output in the age of AI? Are we quick to dismiss even mostly human-generated creative work if AI was involved? Who can claim ownership and credit? What does this mean for companies and industries that rely on creativity and innovation as a competitive advantage? And does using AI in the creative process change how leaders should manage creative teams?  

Lillien Ellis, an assistant professor in the leadership and organizational behavior area at UVA's Darden School of Business, is tackling these questions head-on. As an expert in ethical creativity, Ellis is delving deep into a debate that challenges how people and organizations conceptualize creative output.

She’s tackling the timely issue of what human innovation means when creativity intersects with “intelligent” technology. Moreover, Ellis highlights how working alongside AI tools raises ethical concerns about the ownership, protection and theft of intellectual property. 

“AI-generated text has received a great deal of attention,” says Ellis. “AI images offer a new lens through which to see how knowledge workers leverage artificial intelligence in their creative work — their ‘art’, if you will.”

The Age-Old Question: What Is Art?

The debate over “what is art?” is nothing new. As Ellis points out, photography faced a similar backlash in the 19th century. Charles Baudelaire, the French poet and art critic, famously called photography “art’s most mor­tal enemy.”

Similarly, Jackson Pollock's revolutionary drip painting technique, which involved pouring, splattering, and dripping paint onto large canvases laid on the floor, upended conventional notions of “real” art. This abstract expressionist style discarded traditional methods of composition, form and brushwork, radically reshaping the landscape of the art world.

What makes today’s AI-art controversy different stems from how AI tools generate the images. Apps like DALL-E 2 by OpenAI and Midjourney are trained on vast datasets of images scraped from the Internet, learning to recognize patterns and styles which they then reproduce in new compositions. This process raises ethical concerns, as artists who share their work online may inadvertently be contributing to the development of AI systems that could potentially compete with or replicate their distinctive styles.

The Legal and Ethical Maze of AI Art

This ambiguity has led to heated discussions in both academic and professional circles. Ellis has developed a business case centered around an art gallery executive director grappling with whether to allow AI-generated art in a competition. The case highlights the complex perspectives involved, from a computer scientist to the in-house attorney to other artists. “They all have very interesting perspectives on who owns the output generated by the AI tools that construct images,” she says.

 “The attorney says, ‘Actually, this would belong to the computer scientist, the programmer who made the algorithm. They own it’,” Ellis explains. “But the programmer says, ‘I have nothing to do with what comes out of the program. I’m a programmer. I build machines. I don’t enter in prompts and make images or art that has nothing to do with me whatsoever.’ ”

Who owns the rights to an AI-generated image? Is it the programmer, the user, or the AI itself? And what about the way the image is produced — Is AI art using protected materials? These questions underscore the challenges businesses face as they navigate the integration of AI into creative processes.

Ellis, who teaches the case in the executive education program, emphasizes the importance of thoughtful leadership in this transition: “There are strategies for addressing some of these things at the outset, if business leaders are willing to engage deeply in thinking through the philosophy and the psychology behind the ethics, and behind the law,” she says.

And the time is now. “Leaders have to grapple with how to use these tools and how to implement them, and how to think about the output they generate,” adds Ellis.

AI as a Creative Catalyst

But it's not all doom and gloom for human creativity in the age of AI. Ellis sees potential benefits, particularly for individuals who struggle with the creative process. “For some people, not all, who have low creative efficacy and struggle to come up with ideas and just feel overwhelmed by the creative process, these tools can be a really helpful jumpstart,” she says. Ellis views AI tools as potential “thought partners, not thought substitutes” that can “facilitate in-the-moment creativity.”

Ellis also cautions against over-reliance on these tools. "As folks use it more and more and more, does one's ability to construct an email devolve the more that we use ChatGPT to write our emails?" she ponders.

Lessons from History: Adapting to Change

Drawing parallels to historical technological shifts, Ellis references the film “Hidden Figures” — the real-life story about three Black women working for NASA during the space race — to illustrate adapting to change.

In one scene, Dorothy Vaughan, the first Black supervisor at NASA's Langley Research Center, discovers NASA has installed a new “IBM machine” that can work far faster than humans and decides to teach herself the FORTRAN programming language needed to operate it. She also encourages the women on her team to learn how to code. “We have to know how to program,” she says. “Unless you'd rather be out of a job.”

Just as the women in the film learned to program IBM computers to stay relevant, Ellis suggests that today's workers and artists can learn to harness AI tools effectively.

"When I think about how AI and employees relate to one another and the tension that exists, AI tools are our IBM, the business machine, in this example," says Ellis.

The Future of Creativity in the AI Era

Whether AI will enhance or diminish human creativity remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: the conversation around AI-generated art is just beginning, and its implications extend far beyond the canvas.

Assistant professor Ellis is one of the faculty who will be teaching the upcoming EELL course “Driving Ethical Innovation in the Age of AI” running 13-15 November, 2024.