Data Sheet 1_Judging AI-generated paintings: art-education differences in source classification.pdf

However, performance varied substantially across stimuli. Pairs 1, 3, and 6 were classified significantly above chance, Pair 4 did not differ from chance, and Pairs 2 and 5 were significantly below chance. For Pairs 2 and 5, 60.1% and 67.4% of participants, respectively, selected the human-made painting as AI-generated, indicating systematic reversal of source attribution.

Art-education background was significantly associated with classification performance, Welch’s F(2, 128.292) = 10.135, p < 0.001, but only the some-art-background group performed significantly above chance. Among participants with valid cue rankings, facial and hand details were commonly assigned higher priority, whereas background details were most frequently ranked last; neither first- nor last-ranked cue distributions differed significantly across art-education groups.</p>Discussion<p>AI/human painting source classification was characterized by marked stimulus-specific directionality rather than a uniform level of discrimination difficulty.

The below-chance performance observed for two stimulus pairs indicates systematic source-attribution reversal, while the art-education results do not support a simple monotonic expertise advantage. These findings suggest that source judgments depend on interactions among stimulus-specific visual properties, viewers’ art-education backgrounds, and reported judgment strategies rather than on a single general ability to distinguish AI-generated from human-made paintings.</p>