The integration of AI-driven systems in creative work has sparked intense debates among artists and legal communities about the concept of ownership. However, 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.
Blogger's Review: This article raises a critical question about how to understand and maintain artistic intent in the context of AI involvement in creation. The attempt to quantify ownership may not truly reflect the complexities of artistic creation, warranting deep consideration from both legal and artistic communities.