Novel capacities of generative AI to analyze and generate cultural artifacts raise inevitable questions about the nature and value of artistic education and human expertise. Has AI already leveled the playing field between professional artists and laypeople, or do trained artistic expressive capacity, curation skills and experience instead enhance the ability to use these new tools? In this pre-registered study, we conduct experimental comparisons between 50 active artists and a demographically matched sample of laypeople. We designed two tasks to approximate artistic practice for testing their capabilities in both faithful and creative image creation: replicating a reference image, and moving as far away as possible from it. We developed a bespoke platform where participants used a modern text-to-image model to complete both tasks. We also collected and compared participants' sentiments towards AI. On average, artists produced more faithful and creative outputs than their lay counterparts, although only by a small margin. While AI may ease content creation, professional expertise is still valuable - even within the confined space of generative AI itself. Finally, we also explored how well an exemplary vision-capable large language model (GPT-4o) would complete the same tasks, if given the role of an image generation agent, and found it performed on par in copying but outperformed even artists in the creative task. The very best results were still produced by humans in both tasks. These outcomes highlight the importance of integrating artistic skills with AI training to prepare artists and other visual professionals for a technologically evolving landscape. We see a potential in collaborative synergy with generative AI, which could reshape creative industries and education in the arts.

本研究探讨了在生成性人工智能时代，专业艺术家的艺术教育与人类专业技能的价值。通过对50名活跃艺术家与外行人的实验比较，结果显示虽然AI技术在内容创作中有助力，但专业技能依然对输出的准确性和创造性具有重要影响。此外，研究表明，结合艺术技能与AI训练将为艺术家和视觉专业人士的未来发展提供新的机遇。

专业知识提升AI使用：比较外行人和专业艺术家的实验证据