Man, Machine, and Masterpiece: Artistic Ownership in the AI Era

2026-07-16

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge of attributing authorship in human-AI co-creative works, where the involvement of artificial intelligence complicates traditional notions of ownership. The authors propose ArtSplit, a probe-based design prototype that models collaborative workflows and explicitly quantifies the contributions of both human and AI agents across distinct creative stages. Combining this quantitative framework with qualitative interviews with artists, the research investigates the feasibility of a measurable attribution mechanism. Findings reveal a fundamental tension between algorithmically quantified contribution and artists’ nuanced understandings of creative intent and agency, highlighting the risks of reducing complex socio-historical relations to technical metrics. By deploying a design probe into ongoing debates over artistic ownership, this work offers both a critical perspective and methodological innovation for rethinking authorship in the age of AI.

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.

Problem

• artistic ownership
• AI creativity
• human-AI collaboration
• creative agency
• ownership attribution

Innovation

• provotype
• creative ownership
• AI collaboration
• quantification of contribution
• artistic agency