Artly: Exploring Digital Artists' Perceptions of AI-Generated Feedback

Recent developments in generative AI have lowered barriers to image generation, but existing tools mostly optimize for efficiency, producing generic results and offering little support for artistic growth. We present Artly, an AI system that combines personalizable AI feedback with human-authored learning resources. In a between-subjects study with artists, we compared a mode without image generation features against one that allowed to generate variations of users' illustrations. Artly was perceived as helpful for learning and self-improvement, with the exception of the most proficient participants. Participants who used the image generation feature interacted slightly less with the AI feedback. They reported feeling more creative after using Artly than participants using the restricted mode, while reporting slightly lower scores on new ideas for their work. Overall, our findings underline the potential of our feedback approach for supporting artistic growth in a manner that is well received by artists.