Consumers valued AI paintings less when the creative process felt less authentic

Across five studies, people generally placed more value on paintings attributed to human artists, while NFT authentication narrowed the gap.

Editorial illustration — not from the study.

The research distinguishes between an artwork’s novelty and the perceived authenticity of how it was made. Consumers viewed human authorship as more connected to originality, craftsmanship and uniqueness, and this perception helped explain why they valued human-created paintings more than AI-generated ones.

The studies found no significant indirect effects through perceived creativity, perceived effort or beliefs that creativity is mainly human. In a further study, NFT authentication reduced the difference in perceived authenticity between human and AI art, suggesting that information about a work’s provenance can influence consumer judgments.

How authorship changed value

Across five studies, human authorship produced higher perceived value than AI authorship. Perceived creative authenticity—the sense that a work comes from a genuine, human-centered creative process—mediated this difference in the tested model. Parallel mediation tests found no significant indirect effects through perceived creativity, perceived effort or anthropocentric creativity beliefs. A study of NFT authentication found that it narrowed the authenticity gap between human- and AI-attributed paintings.

Why creative origins matter

The findings suggest that consumers’ responses to AI-generated art depend not only on what an artwork looks like, but also on how they understand its creation. For artists and digital art platforms, communicating a work’s creative origins and provenance may affect how consumers value it, although the study does not establish how these findings apply across all markets or audiences.

Evidence and caveats

The article reports five studies. The first conceptually replicated the human–AI value gap among Chinese consumers; later studies tested mediation, parallel mediation and a moderation-of-process design, with Study 2c providing causal evidence for the proposed process. The abstract does not report sample sizes, participant details for all studies or the specific artworks and market settings used. The results therefore support the proposed mechanism within the tested model, but their broader generalizability is not established by the information provided.

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