How Good Is the Machine at the Imitation Game? On Stylistic Characteristics of AI-Generated Images

Text-to-image generative models can be used to imitate historical artistic styles, but their effectiveness in doing so remains unclear. In this work, we propose an evaluation framework that leverages expert knowledge from art history and visual semiotics and combines it with quantitative analysis to assess stylistic fidelity. Three experts rated both historical artwork production and images generated with Midjourney v6 for five major movements (Abstract Art, Cubism, Expressionism, Impressionism, Surrealism) and ten associated painters (male and female pairs), using nine visual criteria grounded in Greimas’s plastic categories and Wölfflin’s stylistic oppositions. Ratings were expressed as 95% intervals on continuous 0–100 scales and compared using our Relative Ratings Map (RRMap), which summarizes relative shifts, relative dispersion, and distributional overlap (via the Bhattacharyya coefficient). They were also discretized in four quality ratings (bad, stereotype, fair, excellent). The results show strong inter-expert variability and more moderate intra-expert effects tied to movements, criteria, criterion groups and modalities. Experts tend to agree that the model sometimes aligns with historical trends but also sometimes produces stereotyped versions of a movement or painter, or even completely missed its target, although no unanimous consensus emerges. We conclude that evaluating generative models requires both expert-driven interpretation and quantitative tools, and that stylistic fidelity is hard to quantify even with a rigorous framework.