# Man, Machine, and Masterpiece: Artistic Ownership in the AI Era

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15027 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15027/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Artificial Intelligence in the Creative Industries: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12391/) (2020)
- [The Prompt Artists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12253/) (2023)
- ["It was 80% me, 20% AI": Seeking Authenticity in Co-Writing with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13032/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Impact of AI Value Alignment in Collaborative Ideation: Effects on Perception, Ownership, and Output](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12814/) (2024)
- [IntentTuner: An Interactive Framework for Integrating Human Intents in Fine-tuning Text-to-Image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15559/) (2024)
- [When Teams Embrace AI: Human Collaboration Strategies in Generative Prompting in a Creative Design Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21731/) (2025)
- [Deep Else: A Critical Framework for AI Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19754/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The integration of AI-driven systems in creative work has sparked debates among artists and legal communities about notions of ownership. Yet there remains little consensus on how ownership should be defined and attributed when human and AI contributions are intertwined. To provoke critical reflection on these tensions, we designed ArtSplit, a provotype that explicitly quantifies human and AI contributions across different stages of creative work. Rather than aiming to resolve ownership, the provotype was used to elicit artists' responses to the idea of attributing ownership through measurable actions in the creative workflow. We argue that quantification fails to align with artists' understandings of creative intent and agency, and that efforts to measure ownership risk diluting long-standing assumptions through which artists understand and practice creative work. This critique challenges the impulse to transform a historically and socially situated relation into a technical problem.