Experimental Comparison of AI Use by Professional Artists and Laypeople

A pre-registered experimental study compares 50 active professional visual artists with a matched laypeople sample on tasks using text-to-image AI. The study assessed copying accuracy and creative thinking, finding a small but detectable advantage for artists. The dataset includes results from this experiment, which was conducted by Thomas F. Eisenmann and last updated in May 2026.

Use Cases

• Analyze the transfer of visual art skills to AI tools based on the experimental comparison of artists and laypeople.
• Study the relationship between human expertise and generative AI performance based on the copying accuracy and creative thinking tasks.
• Benchmark AI model performance against human experts based on the comparison with GPT-4o included in the study.

Strengths

• Pre-registered experimental design with 50 professional artists and a matched control group.
• Results include comparisons with a state-of-the-art vision-capable LLM (GPT-4o).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Thomas F. Eisenmann via figshare.

Collection Method

Experimental study using a bespoke platform powered by text-to-image AI.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-18 12:25:46.