Art has been an important part of human culture almost since the very beginning of our existence, whereas artificial intelligence and its achievements have been more widely discussed only in the past few years. Questions about the true creativity (e.g., Wingström et al., 2022) and authorship (e.g., Cetinić and She, 2022) of paintings that artificial intelligence can create become secondary if programmes using artificial intelligence successfully pass the Turing or Lovelace test (Bringsjord et al., 2003). Therefore, given the lack of research on this topic, especially using Stable Diffusion programme for image generation, the aim of this study was to examine how laymen and experts perceive the imagination, competence, and empathy towards works of art and their painters, depending on whether the paintings were created by humans or artificial intelligence, while controlling for participants' creative self-concept, Openness, and Intellect. The participants in this study were laymen (N = 98) and experts in the field of visual arts (N = 85). Participants completed the Openness and Intellect factors from the Croatian version of the IPIP marker for measuring the five-factor model, the Short Scale of Creative Self, and below each of the 5 pairs of paintings (one created by artificial intelligence and one by a human) matched by artistic style, they completed the Perceived imaginativeness scale, the Empathy scale, and the Painter's Competence Scale. The results showed that all participants preferred images created by humans over those created by artificial intelligence. Laymen generally considered the images more imaginative and the painters more competent, while experts empathized more with the painting authors than laymen did. Laymen found works created by artificial intelligence to be more imaginative, whereas experts found works created by humans to be more imaginative. Experts empathized much more with the author when the author was human, and laypeople had a much greater impression of the painter's competence compared to experts when the author was artificial intelligence.