Reading list: Margaritha Windisch, Unveiling the Bond Between Artists and Their Work: A Vignette Study

Unveiling the Bond Between Artists and Their Work: A Vignette Study

38 Pages Posted: 12 Feb 2025 Last revised: 19 Feb 2025

Margaritha Windisch

Date Written: January 31, 2025

Abstract

This paper empirically measures the bond between artists and their work. In a pre-registered vignette study, the impact of generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) in the creation process on the relationship between artists and their creations is investigated. The study provides evidence for the personality-rights theory of copyright law, predominant in continental Europe, which emphasizes a close personal bond between creators and their creations. While other theories of copyright law, such as the incentive and the labor theory, have already received much attention from the empirical research community, the personality-based approach to copyright law has been primarily discussed as a mere theoretical concept. To address this knowledge gap, over 200 art students from the five top art schools in Switzerland participated in an online vignette study where they were randomly assigned to go through the creation process of visual artwork using either (i) traditional drawing tools on a canvas, (ii) digital drawing software on a tablet, or (iii) an AI image generator. The results record the degree of the participants' emotional attachment to their artwork and indicate a nuanced relationship between technological tools and the artist's bond to their work. While there is no significant di!erence in emotional attachment between traditional and digital drawing tools, using an AI image generator leads to a statistically significant decrease in the artist's bond to their work and their perception of the work as their own intellectual creation. These findings suggest that the use of generative AI tools to create artwork impacts the extent to which artists can personally express themselves in their artistic endeavors, which has significant implications for policymakers in the fields of copyright law and technology as they navigate the landscape of copyright protection and authorship of AI-generated works.