The Ethics of AI Art

When people understand AI-generated art’s underlying system and process, its moral implications become harder to accept

- BY IONELA BARA

IN EARLY 2025 AUCTION HOUSE Christie’s in New York City sold an unusual collection of art pieces. Surreal portraits, photorealistic images and cartoon-inspired creations, all generated by artificial intelligence, raked in more than $700,000, beating sale estimates. The first-of-its-kind event also sparked a backlash. More than 6,000 artists protested that the AI models used to create these works had been trained on copyrighted images without creator consent. Although the auction house had argued that the works demonstrated “human agency in the age of AI,” critics saw the event as an example of an industry rushing to commercialize technology built on uncompensated creative labor.

Other artistic and professional communities have also been worried. A report released last November found that more than half of novelists surveyed in the U.K. thought AI could end their career. Many authors believed that their work had already been used without consent to train large language models and that AI was flooding the market with low-quality prose. Audiences seem to have complicated feelings about the technology, too. As one survey found, many Americans are okay with AI as a tool for creative professionals but not as a replacement for their work.

A viewer’s comfort with AI art, however, may depend on how much they know about the way it was made. I study neuroaesthetics, a field that combines neuroscience, psychology, and our perception of beauty and art. My colleagues and I have found that the more people learn about how AI’s back end works—the datasets, training process and prompting—the less comfortable they are with the moral considerations surrounding these creations and the value of AI-generated pieces.