A cross-disciplinary team of Georgetown students and faculty will showcase entries from a campus-wide artificial intelligence (AI) generated art competition at the AI Art Exhibition on April 16 to explore how people perceive the creative value of AI artwork.
The exhibition, titled “A.I. in Art: Perceptions, Values, & Rights” will open from 4:30–6:30 p.m. on Wednesday at Lauinger Library. Faculty members and students from Georgetown Law organized the project alongside those from Georgetown’s computer science and art departments, as part of a research study on perceptions of AI art. Entrants could submit artwork they created using Dall-E, a free AI-image generator which OpenAI, the parent company of Chat-GPT, built.
The exhibition presents an opportunity for members of the Georgetown community to engage directly with AI-generated art. Judy Wang (CAS ’27), one of the facilitator’s of the project, hopes that it’ll offer a space to consider not only its creative and legal implications, but also its potential to reshape the future of the art market.
“People’s perceptions [of AI Art] are going to translate into how much they value the work and how likely they are to buy it, so I think some semblance of an idea as to how this market is going to be shaken up by AI would be really helpful,” Wang said.
AI has already begun to impact the global art market. Christie’s, a major art auction house, held an auction consisting solely of AI-generated art pieces in February of this year. Sales for the artwork totaled $728,784, with one piece selling for $277,220.
For the competition, entrants could submit art for two categories: artwork they produced by solely inputting prompts into Dall-E, or artwork that was created only partially using AI. Entrants could qualify for the partial-AI category by submitting artwork that they initially made using traditional art mediums and inputting it into Dall-E to create a new piece of art. Alternatively, they could submit an AI-generated image that they altered using traditional art mediums.
Over 150 pieces of artwork were submitted to the competition. The creators of the six highest-ranked entirely AI-generated art pieces and the six highest-ranked partial-AI art pieces will have their work on display and earn cash prizes at the exhibition. Along with entrants, the competition’s organizers also recruited two types of judges: peer-evaluators, or students, and expert jurors, who are professionals and faculty members with backgrounds in art. The organizers recruited 100 students and five expert jurors to judge the competition.
The exhibit will spotlight the winners’ art along with short descriptions written by the artists, detailing their creation processes, inspirations for the piece, and the challenges they encountered during image creation.
Omar Alameddine (CAS ’28), submitted an entirely AI-generated art piece to the competition after seeing flyers for it around campus. He wrote a prompt describing Napoleon Bonaparte during the French Revolution, a topic which he had recently encountered in class.
Having never used an AI image generator before, Alameddine was surprised at how well Dall-E was able to produce images based on prompts.
“I didn’t know that image generation could be that accurate and come up with such a high quality and understand colors, saturations, and all of those disparate technical details,” Alameddine said. “It was able to very accurately produce the prompt that I described.”
As AI becomes increasingly capable of producing artwork, some are concerned about its potential drawbacks. A series of states, including Tennessee and California, have passed laws explicitly protecting musicians and artists from unauthorized use of their likeness or material without their consent. The laws stem from a concern that AI’s copying of artists could devalue their work. Generative AI-models require significantly more energy and water than regular computer models, raising concerns about the potentially negative impacts AI could have on the environment.
The group behind the exhibition in Lau hopes that the results of the study will help to inform future policies by the U.S. Copyright Office regarding AI-generated-art. The office currently holds that AI-generated artwork is not copyrightable. However, a Jan. 2025 U.S. Copyright Office report determined that artists could receive copyright protections for art involving the use of AI if they modified or arranged AI-generated art in a way that expressed human creativity. For instance, if an artist made a collage out of pieces of an AI-generated image, they would not receive copyright protections for the pieces themselves but could for their arrangement of the pieces.
Kristelia García is a law professor at Georgetown Law specializing in copyright law, and is one of the organizers of the study. She hopes the results of the project can help the copyright office determine future regulations.
“The copyright office is maintaining at the moment under the statute that only humans can be authors,” Garcia said. “So we hope that this jury competition will help us [to] help them answer the question, ‘When does it move from the work of human creativity into the work of a machine?’”
To Wang, the exhibit presents an opportunity for people unfamiliar with the capabilities of AI art generators to see how far they’ve already come.
“It’s somewhat of a glimpse into the future. It’s cool, whether you support AI art or not, to gain an understanding of the sheer capacity of what the generation models can do, and to read some of the synopses and the processes that the selected winners have written about their creative process,” Wang said. “I think it will bring you more questions than answers, but it is no longer a problem or a future that we can ignore or close our eyes about.”
