Artificial creativity and agency negotiation: Understanding AI-generated visual art from artistic practitioners’ perceptions

Creativity is widely understood as a distinct human characteristic, yet the advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping creative ecosystems, presenting both opportunities and challenges. Despite these advancements, comprehensive insights into how social groups, especially stakeholders, perceive and experience AI-generated art remain inadequate. Through semi-structured interviews with 23 artistic practitioners in China across visual art domains such as painting, design, and filmmaking, this study identifies themes related to practitioners’ perceptions of the creative process (mechanism and time), created works (aesthetic and quality), and creating actors (role and ownership) from a human-AI comparative view. Contextualized perceptions shaped by variations across art domains are also revealed. As human-AI collaboration in artistic creation gains prominence, this study also illustrates how artistic practitioners negotiate their agency with machine agency through dual routes: the affective route and the action route. The findings contribute to the ongoing discourse of artificial creativity, enrich the socio-technical understandings of AI-generated visual art and shed light on the agency dynamics between human and AI within the context of artistic creation.