Understanding Visual Artists’ Values and Attitudes towards Collaboration, Technology, and AI

Hannah Johnston, David Thue

Letter Of Changes:

Summary of updates:
- Clarified the data analysis process:
- Explained the connection between survey and interview data.
- Specified which follow up questions were modified based on survey responses.
- Provided a rationale for analyzing the data together.
- Added caveats on the applicability of human-human collaboration findings to human-machine findings.
- Added related work on technology support for artists and clarified the difference between our work and the larger body of work on creativity support tools.
- Added additional information about the study participants.
- Clarified the paper’s objectives in the introduction and explained why we studied technology-use beyond AI.
- Shortened the paper to fit 8 pages before references, compressing all sections.
- Explained our approach to survey data quality and ensuring legitimate responses.
- Removed the questionnaire and interview guide as a contribution.

Keywords: Visual Art, Collaboration, Artificial Intelligence, Creativity Support Tools, User Experience, Generative Research

TL;DR: We explored visual artists’ needs and values to inform the design of future collaborative human-AI art tools.

Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools have recently gained widespread interest for image creation, but tool developers have largely focused on technical capabilities or specialized domain uses, rather than visual artists as users. We collected survey data from 89 practising visual artists and conducted follow-up interviews with 30 of them, to better understand their diverse needs and values. Through reflexive thematic analysis, we explored visual artists' attitudes towards collaboration in art creation both with human artists and with AI- and other technology-based support systems. Our results suggest that the focus of popular AI tools on high-quality, finished images does not meet the needs of visual artists. Instead, they wanted reference images, ideation support, and variant exploration. We identified similarities and differences between how visual artists view collaboration with other artists or with machine support, enabling designers of new tools to adopt a more user-centered approach.

Submission Number: 44