Recent breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI) have fueled debates concerning the status of AI-generated creations under copyright law. This research investigates laypeople's perceptions ($N$ = 424) of AI-generated art concerning factors associated with copyright protection. Inspired by prior work suggesting that people show egocentric biases when evaluating their own creative outputs, we also test if the same holds for AI-generated art. Namely, we study the differences between the perceptions of those who have something to gain from copyright protection -- creators of AI-generated art -- and uninvested third parties. To answer our research questions, we held an incentivized AI art competition, in which some participants used a GenAI model to generate images for consideration while others evaluated these submissions. We find that participants are most likely to attribute authorship and copyright over AI-generated images to the users who prompted the AI system to generate the image and the artists whose creations were used for training the AI model. We also find that participants egocentrically favored their own art over other participants' art and rated their own creations higher than other people evaluated them. Moreover, our results suggest that people judge their own AI-generated art more favorably with respect to some factors (creativity and effort) but not others (skills). Our findings have implications for future debates concerning the potential copyright protection of AI-generated outputs.

翻译：生成式人工智能（GenAI）的最新突破引发了关于AI生成作品在著作权法中的地位的争论。本研究调查了外行人士（$N$ = 424）对AI生成艺术在著作权保护相关因素上的认知。受先前研究表明人们在评估自身创造性产出时表现出自我中心偏见所启发，我们同样检验了这种现象是否也存在于对AI生成艺术的认知中。具体而言，我们研究了可能从著作权保护中获益的群体——AI生成艺术的创作者——与无利害关系的第三方在认知上的差异。为回答研究问题，我们举办了一场有激励机制的AI艺术竞赛，其中部分参与者使用GenAI模型生成图像以供评审，而其他参与者则对这些提交作品进行评价。我们发现，参与者最倾向于将AI生成图像的作者身份和著作权归属于提示AI系统生成图像的用户，以及其作品被用于训练AI模型的艺术家。我们还发现，参与者以自我为中心的方式偏爱自己的作品胜过其他参与者的作品，并且对自己作品的评价高于他人对其作品的评价。此外，我们的结果表明，人们在某些因素（创造性和努力）上对自己生成的AI艺术评价更为积极，但在其他因素（技能）上则不然。我们的研究发现对未来关于AI生成作品潜在著作权保护的讨论具有启示意义。