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.