AI boom creates a 'human premium' for art as audiences place extra value on work made by real people

Music platform Deezer reports that 44% of tracks uploaded to it are now AI-generated, yet research shows that while 97% of listeners cannot distinguish AI-created music from human-made, more than half said they cared whether a piece of art was made by a human. Economics professor Daniel Susskind of King's College London argues that people value not just the creative output but the knowledge that a human mind produced it, comparing the phenomenon to chess fans' continued enthusiasm after IBM's Deep Blue defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Journalist Kyle Chayka of The New Yorker observes that AI writing is now widely perceived as 'generic, obsequious and banal', leading readers to value overtly personal and even structurally imperfect human writing more highly.