Understanding Generative AI in Art: An Interview Study with Artists on G-AI from an HCI Perspective

The emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (G-AI) has changed the landscape of creative arts with its power to compose novel artwork and thus brought ethical concerns. Despite the efforts by prior works to address these concerns from technical and societal perspectives, there exists little discussion on this topic from an HCI point of view, considering the artists as human factors. We sought to investigate the impact of G-AI on artists, understanding the relationship between artists and G-AI, in order to motivate the underlying HCI research. We conducted semi-structured interviews with artists (N=25) from diverse artistic disciplines involved with G-AI in their artistic creation. We found (1) a dilemma among the artists, (2) a disparity in the understanding of G-AI between the artists and the AI developers(3) a tendency to oppose G-AI among the artists. We discuss the future opportunities of HCI research to tackle the problems identified from the interviews.