Communication in Human–AI Co-Creation: Perceptual Analysis of Paintings Generated by Text-to-Image System

Abstract

In recent years, art creation using artificial intelligence (AI) has started to become a mainstream phenomenon. One of the latest applications of AI is to generate visual artwork from natural language descriptions where anyone can interact with it to create thousands of artistic images with minimal effort, which provokes the questions: what is the essence of artistic creation, and who can create art in this era? Considering that, in this study, the theoretical communication framework was adopted to investigate the difference in the interaction with the text-to-image system between artists and nonartists. In this experiment, ten artists and ten nonartists were invited to co-create with Midjourney. Their actions and reflections were recorded, and two sets of generated images were collected for the visual question-answering task, with a painting created by the artist as a reference sample. A total of forty-two subjects with artistic backgrounds participated in the evaluated experiment. The results indicated differences between the two groups in their creation actions and their attitude toward AI, while the technology blurred the difference in the perception of the results caused by the creator’s artistic experience. In addition, attention should be paid to communication on the effectiveness level for a better perception of the artistic value.