Proverbs as indicators of proficiency for art-generating AI

Abstract Art generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently having great repercussion online. The reason for this is the fact that it allows people without creative talent to produce outstanding works by just typing in the description of what they want to illustrate. However, the appearance of this technology has also caused some discomfort among artists and graphic designers, who see their craft threatened by a service that is available to anyone free of charge. In this article, the capability of some of these platforms to process figurative language will be assessed with the help of five well-known proverbs found in almost identical terms across a number of Western languages. These proverbs were used as the prompts on five of the most popular AI art generators accessible at present. After analyzing the results, our experiment concludes that AI evidences significant deficiencies in the processing of proverbs and, therefore, of figurative language. Consequently, AI does not seem able to substitute human agency completely in artistic creation yet. This exposes an aspect that needs improvement not just for the creative applications of AI but for other applications that it may have in the future. To achieve this, disciplines such as psycholinguistics should be integrated into the teams that develop AI.