Beyond ethics and aesthetics: perceived lay theory violations and agency disruption in AI-generated art

The use of AI to generate art has sparked responses ranging from fascination to anger and resistance, raising fundamental questions about the nature of creativity and human artistic identity. This paper argues that the devaluation of AI-generated work stems in part from disruptions to culturally ingrained lay theories of creativity. These intuitive frameworks link artistic value to human creative performance, particularly the perceived “spark” of embodied insight and a coherent history of generative human agency. Unlike traditional creative processes, AI is perceived as proceduralizing the associative processes underlying creative insight, producing artifacts in which the link between the creative performance and the artistic outcome is no longer readily reconstructible. This shift generates a psychological gap: observers may recognize the aesthetic quality of an artifact while struggling to anchor it to a coherent human generative process. Drawing on frameworks of agency mapping, artistic communication, and appraisal-based emotion, the analysis shows how AI disrupts the mechanisms that audiences rely on to value and categorize art. Rather than tracking surface cues in the artifact, these mechanisms depend on reconstructing a human creative performance that links intention, process, and outcome into a unified generative history. When this reconstruction fails, artifacts no longer reliably satisfy mechanisms such as magical contagion, the extended self, the artistic design stance, and communicative inference, all of which depend on perceiving a human mind as the originating source of creative action. This structural breakdown elicits two core emotional responses: aesthetic anger, triggered by violations of expectations about human creative authorship, and ontological unease, arising from the simulation of uniquely human creative processes by a non-biological system. The paper further examines organizational framings of AI-generated art, as Tool, Collaborator, or Threat, highlighting how these interpretations attempt to stabilize uncertainty in agency reconstruction. Understanding these cognitive and emotional dynamics clarifies why AI-generated art provokes resistance even when its outputs are aesthetically compelling.