Human, Do You Think This Painting is the Work of a Real Artist?

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to be applied in the field of art, which had hitherto been an area exclusively reserved for human creativity. Using online AI tools, lay people can easily create artworks that imitate the style of famous artists. Consequently, human judgment on the authenticity of artworks has become critical. While many studies have focused on copyright or value of AI-created artworks, we examine whether human beings can distinguish between paintings drawn by artists and fake paintings created using AI tools. We selected the AI’s recommendations for each artwork and prior information about the artists as factors that can affect human judgment and investigated how the two factors affect people’s discriminative abilities. We found that people have difficulty distinguishing authentic from fake artwork and that additional information about artists and artworks can affect people’s criteria for judging paintings. Furthermore, AI recommendations can help discriminate fake paintings, suggesting that AI-assisted decision-making could play an assistive role in human identification of digitized fake paintings.

Keywords:

• Art determination
• artificial intelligence
• AI-assisted decision making
• deep learning
• fake paintings

Data availability

The participants of this study did not give written consent for their data to be shared publicly, so due to the sensitive nature of the research supporting data is not available.

Disclosure statement

No potential competing interests were reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. 2023R1A2C200337911 and No. RS-2023-00220762).

Notes on contributors

Jeongeun Park

Jeongeun Park is currently a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of Information at Yonsei University. She received a BS in electrical and electronic engineering and a master’s degree in information systems from Yonsei University. Her primary research areas are human–computer interaction, generative models, and deep-learning applications.

Hyunmin Kang

Hyunmin Kang is a research scientist at the Stanford Center at the Incheon Global Campus. He is interested in the field of AI-human interaction based on human factors and cognitive engineering, and has been studying how smart technologies affect human life and society.

Ha Young Kim

Ha Young Kim is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Information at Yonsei University. She received her PhD from the Department of Mathematics at Purdue University. She was a researcher at the Samsung Electronics. Her primary research areas are deep learning, human–computer interaction, and intelligent applications.