"Confrontation or Acceptance": Understanding Novice Visual Artists' Perception towards AI-assisted Art Creation

Abstract: The rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence (G-AI) has transformed the creative arts landscape by producing novel artwork, whereas in the same time raising ethical concerns. While previous studies have addressed these concerns from technical and societal viewpoints, there is a lack of discussion from an HCI perspective, especially considering the community's perception and the visual artists as human factors. Our study investigates G-AI's impact on visual artists and their relationship with GAI to inform HCI research. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 novice visual artists from an art college in the university with G-AI courses and practices. Our findings reveal (1) the mis-conception and the evolving adoption of visual artists, (2) the miscellaneous opinions of the society on visual artists' creative work, and (3) the co-existence of confrontation and collaboration between visual artists and G-AI. We explore future HCI research opportunities to address these issues.