Man, Machine, and Masterpiece: Artistic Ownership in the AI Era
Artificial Intelligence
Summary
The authors explore how ownership should be shared when humans and AI work together in creative projects. They created a tool called ArtSplit to measure how much each contributes during the creative process. However, their study found that artists don't think ownership can be fairly captured just by numbers, because creativity involves intentions and agency that numbers miss. The authors suggest that trying to turn ownership into a technical measurement overlooks the social and historical meaning artists place on their work.
Authors
Sofi Gjing Jovanovska, Kuntal Ghosh, Daniel Muhu Njenga, Ahmed Mufassir, Shadan Sadeghian
Abstract
The integration of AI-driven systems in creative work has sparked debates among artists and legal communities about notions of ownership. Yet there remains little consensus on how ownership should be defined and attributed when human and AI contributions are intertwined. To provoke critical reflection on these tensions, we designed ArtSplit, a provotype that explicitly quantifies human and AI contributions across different stages of creative work. Rather than aiming to resolve ownership, the provotype was used to elicit artists' responses to the idea of attributing ownership through measurable actions in the creative workflow. We argue that quantification fails to align with artists' understandings of creative intent and agency, and that efforts to measure ownership risk diluting long-standing assumptions through which artists understand and practice creative work. This critique challenges the impulse to transform a historically and socially situated relation into a technical problem.