Digital Art Ecosystem: A Proposed Theoretical Construct

The art world has been transformed by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models in the last three years, creating new possibilities and challenges. Their impact on the art world is too broad and not fully explored yet. To make this possible, it is important to map out ecosystems to increase awareness, facilitate future research, and aid decision-making and problem solving in the art world. One area of interest includes digital art, which has become important to contemporary art world stakeholders and the cultural and creative industries’ (CCI) that are adopting these technologies. However, there is no clear definition of what a digital art ecosystem is and what constitutes it. This paper discusses relevant reviewed literature to construct a theoretical ecosystem for digital art to help guide future research on addressing existing and emerging challenges by text-to-image generators while fostering a healthy digital art ecosystem in the current AI art paradigm.