Unlimited Editions: Documenting Human Style in AI Art Generation

TL;DR

This paper argues that AI art should be understood as a reflection of human creative struggles and proposes documenting the evolution of artistic style in generated images to better capture artistic value.

Contribution

It introduces a new perspective on AI art emphasizing the importance of documenting stylistic lineage and creative choices, moving beyond mere aesthetic reproduction.

Findings

Historical analysis shows artistic style as creative struggle and influence.

Current AI systems lack provenance tracking of artistic choices.

Proposes technical directions for documenting stylistic evolution in AI-generated art.

Abstract

As AI art generation becomes increasingly sophisticated, HCI research has focused primarily on questions of detection, authenticity, and automation. This paper argues that such approaches fundamentally misunderstand how artistic value emerges from the concerns that drive human image production. Through examination of historical precedents, we demonstrate that artistic style is not only visual appearance but the resolution of creative struggle, as artists wrestle with influence and technical constraints to develop unique ways of seeing. Current AI systems flatten these human choices into reproducible patterns without preserving their provenance. We propose that HCI's role lies not only in perfecting visual output, but in developing means to document the origins and evolution of artistic style as it appears within generated visual traces. This reframing suggests new technical directions for HCI research in generative AI, focused on automatic documentation of stylistic lineage and creative choice rather than simple reproduction of aesthetic effects.