Moving the Goal Posts: Exposure to AI-made Products Changes Evaluation Criteria for Human-made Products

• In Event: 40860 - Section on Economic Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 7. Atypical markets II

Abstract

A central question in management concerns how human creative output is valued. The question has gathered particular significance as AI becomes increasing adept at a range of cognitively complex tasks, most notably creative endeavors. Recent work, for instance, has found that art labeled as human-made is seen as more creative, more expensive, and more skillful than art labeled as machine-made. Our study delves deeper into the implications of AI becoming a producer on its own right by examining how evaluation criteria and valuations based on those criteria change as evaluators engage with AI-generated creative work. We propose that as the capabilities of AI approach those of humans, people place more importance on evaluative criteria that cannot be applied to AI, effectively “moving the goalposts” to favor distinctively human qualities. We test this argument in two studies, an observational study of art-related corpuses and a randomized experiment. In discussions on Reddit groups related to art and critical reviews on ArtNet, we find an increase in the relative frequency of comments discussing evaluative criteria not applicable to AI (versus criteria applicable to AI) and a more positive stance towards these criteria after the widespread introduction of OpenAI’s Chat GPT 3. In an online experiment, we find that participants who evaluate an AI-made sculpture before a human-made one are more likely to list AI-incompatible criteria as being more important to their evaluation and to rate the human-made sculpture higher on these criteria, relative to a control group of participants who only evaluate human-made sculptures.

Authors

• Ozgecan Kocak, Emory University

• Mitali Banerjee, HEC Paris

• Matthew Yeaton