  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.
