You step into a gallery and find yourself lingering in front of a dramatic painting. The colors pull you in and the composition suggests something profound. You wait for that familiar spark, the sense of wonder that tells you a work of art is doing its job.
But instead, a different thought interrupts: Was this made by AI? And with that, the emotional impact seems to drain away.
As artificial intelligence becomes a ubiquitous creative tool, does art still move us in the same way when we believe a human didn’t make it? New research from Columbia Business School Professor Rebecca Ponde de Leon and PhD candidate Mike W. White suggests the answer is more complicated than we might expect. They hypothesize that when people believe art is made by AI, they are less likely to engage in deep reflection and search for meaning in the art — a core part of the "awe" experience.
Across five studies, the two found that art labeled as AI-generated reliably evokes less awe, and in turn, less empathy, than identical art attributed to people. The difference isn’t in the work itself, but in what viewers believe lies behind it.
Peeking Behind the Canvas
To understand how beliefs about authorship shape emotional experience, Ponce de Leon and White conducted five studies using both visual art and poetry. These mediums were chosen as the researchers could more easily manipulate whether people believed the art was human-made or AI-generated.
In each study, participants saw the same artwork or poem but were told it was created either by a human artist or an AI system. This simple shift in attribution allowed the team to isolate how the perceived creator influenced emotional reactions.
Settings ranged from art museums to online panels to a corporate lobby, ensuring the findings weren’t limited to a single type of viewer or context. Measures focused on awe, empathy, and the cognitive appraisals that typically give rise to awe, such as feeling that a work is vast or worldview-expanding.
“If you're at the museum and you're looking at a piece for a while, you're spending time reflecting on what the art means. We think that when you say the art is made by an AI, people don't engage in that in the exact same way,” White says. “They're not searching for that deeper meaning. They don't get that aha moment.”
Why AI Art Doesn’t Hit the Same
Across all five studies,participants reported less awe and less empathy when they believed a piece was created by AI, even though the artwork or poem was identical across conditions. Simply changing the label altered the emotional experience.
According to Ponce de Leon and White, that is because awe typically arises when something feels vast, impressive, or cognitively demanding—when it stretches our understanding and invites us to reinterpret the world. Human-made art tends to carry traces of intention, effort, and lived experience. Viewers instinctively search for meaning behind the work and often imagine the artist’s mind at work.
When the creator is believed to be an AI system, that reflective process seems to shut down. Viewers perceive the art as less meaningful, less intentional, and less demanding of reinterpretation. Without the sense that another human mind is communicating something, the cognitive “accommodation” required for awe never fully engages.
Ponce de Leon notes that even in the case of abstract or purely aesthetic art, “ that experience of awe is something we tend to encounter when we look at art regardless of the type. I think that the awe piece might still hold if you're not necessarily intending to forge human connection.”
The studies also showed that this emotional gap isn’t just theoretical. Viewers were less likely to feel empathy for the subjects depicted in human hardship scenes, such as survivors of natural disasters, when told the artwork was AI-generated. In some cases, they were even less likely to donate money after viewing the work.
Why Human Intent Still Matters
The shift toward AI-generated art raises important considerations for organizations that rely on the empathic power of the arts.
Institutions that use art as a tool to cultivate empathy may need to consider the psychological impact of AI involvement in creation. For this reason, businesses, too, must consciously preserve the perception of human effort.
“When we’re thinking about the digital future, we're looking at AI and how it’s changing how people feel about one another. It's changing the emotions we're feeling and our capacity for empathy,” White says. “So, as we think about what organizations look like, are there missed opportunities? Maybe as we're bringing in AI in the workplace we really need to highlight all the ways that humans are still involved, to protect against these negative effects.”
