Computer Art Elicits Emotion, But Not As Much As Human Art

Whether you like it or not, people are increasingly seeing art that was generated by computers. Everyone has an opinion about it, but researchers at the University of Vienna recently ran a small study to find out how people actually perceive computer-generated art.

In the study, led by Theresa Demmer, people were shown abstract art of black and white blocks in a grid. The art was either generated by a human artist or by a random number generator.

“For the computer-generated images, we avoided using AI or a self-learning algorithm trained on human-generated images but chose to use a very simple algorithm instead,” Demmer told the University of Vienna. “The goal of this approach was to produce images that were completely independent of human-made influences, striving for the greatest possible freedom from human bias.”

The block-based art constraints were chosen because they could easily be created by either a human artist or by a computer, but also because they somewhat resemble existing art such as some of Gerhard Richter’s abstract work. That made it more of a realistic experience, assuming the study participants had seen this sort of art before.

During the study, people were told whether the art they were shown was made by a human or generated by a computer and then they were asked to rate the artwork and to share how it made them feel. Based on the information they were given, the volunteers then assigned emotions to both human-made and computer-generated art.

However, the twist was that half of the time the volunteers were not told the truth about whether they saw computer-generated art or not. Still, when the researchers looked at all the data they noticed that people rated human-made art slightly higher – even if they were given the wrong information and been told that it was computer art.

This was a very small study, with only 48 volunteers who each looked at 24 pieces of art, so it shouldn’t be taken to have huge implications for how people see any form of computer-generated art, but it’s an interesting observation that the researchers hope to explore further, according to their research paper published in Computers in Human Behavior.

It’s also worth considering that when we see computer-generated art, there is often some kind of human element to it. Demmer and colleagues tried to diminish that in this study by excluding AI art, which is trained on human-generated art and could therefore have more human elements than something that was entirely random.

However, even if you look at a gallery of computer-generated art that didn’t use AI based on human-made art, there is a good chance that a person was involved either in creating the algorithm that generates the art or in selecting which images to show to people.

It’s always difficult to completely eliminate human input, so it’s not entirely surprising that computer generate art elicits emotion. Still, it’s interesting that very similar looking abstract art made by humans elicits even stronger emotions, at least in this study. Was there something that made people notice the human element in it? That’s a question for a future research study.

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