My Final Research Project

My Voyant:

Abstract

Courtney Thurber Dr. Johnson DIG 3171 November 3, 2025

Creativity at the Crossroads: Exploring Ethics and Authorship within AI Art is a data-driven analysis that uses Voyant Tools to examine how scholars have discussed the evolving relationship between artificial intelligence and the creative practice. By uploading a curated corpus of academic and popular sources on AI art, Voyant’s was able to add visualizations. This included the Cirrus word cloud, Trends, Contexts, and Collocates, which helped to identify recurring concepts, rhetorical patterns, and the tensions in current discourse.

This analysis reflects several dominant clusters of terms including creativity, authorship, ethics, labor, originality, and agency. These clusters show the central debate over whether AI functions as a mere tool or as an active creative collaborator within Art. The trends data showed an emphasis on the ethical concerns regarding AI in Art such as bias, responsibility, and transparency in the findings that exposed how frequently their are discussions of AI art within human creativity. The collocates further demonstrated how terms such as artist, machine, and value are also intertwined across the corpus which adds to the indication that questions of ownership, authenticity, and cultural impact remain unresolved in the field.

By creating this project in a Voyant visualization and text mining, this research offers a clear look at the language shaping the conversations about AI-generated art. This project argues that the discourse around AI creativity reflects broader uncertainties about human agency, digital authorship, and the cultural responsibilities that accompany these new emerging technologies.