CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognition
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1648480
Creativity and Aesthetic Evaluation of AI-Generated Artworks: Bridging Problems and Methods from Psychology to AI
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Macerata, Macerata, Italy
- 2Universita degli Studi di Verona, Verona, Italy
- 3Universita degli Studi di Pisa, Pisa, Italy
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This paper contributes to the debate on creativity, art, and artificial intelligence (AI) by integrating insights from cognitive psychology and empirical aesthetics into the field of AI, with the goal of inspiring novel empirical research. We focus on two main topics. First, we examined the indices used in psychology to operationalize creativity in closed-ended and open-ended tasks, with the aim not only of demonstrating the multidimensionality involved in defining creativity, but also of stimulating reflection on the benefits that might arise from developing a similar standard set of indices to test AI scoring models for assessing creativity (of both human and AI-generated responses). Second, we focused on the situation in which the creative products generated by AI are works of art, and on their aesthetic evaluation by non-expert human observers. Bridging the literature developed in psychology of art and empirical aesthetics with the literature on AI, a number of questions emerged, regarding the bias about the "expected style" of AI-generated art, and possible variables that play a role in aversion to AI-generated art. They all suggest possible future empirical research directions.
Keywords: Human creativity, AI creativity, human and AI-generated artworks, AI-generated art aversion, Pleasure and Interest model of Aesthetic appreciation
Received: 17 Jun 2025; Accepted: 21 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bianchi, Branchini, Bongelli and Uricchio. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ivana Bianchi, University of Macerata, Macerata, Italy
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