How Much of This Is Mine? Shapley Credit for the Aesthetic Reranker

Recent audits establish that the aesthetic filters sitting inside image pipelines carry a specific taste, one that scores Cubism below Realism and Picasso below the academic painters of his century. We ask what that taste costs the artist in authorship. Treating a text-to-image pipeline as a cooperative game among four removable players, the subject clause, the style clause, the generator's aesthetic alignment, and the reranker that picks the final image from a pool, we compute exact Shapley shares of the finished artifact over 128 intended works and 12,800 generated images. The shares are computed four times under four value functions: the reranker's own aesthetic score, fidelity to the artist's complete stated prompt, distinctiveness, and realisation of the requested movement. The headline share is an artifact of the setup. When the reranker selects by LAION-Aesthetics and we also grade by LAION-Aesthetics, its share is +0.634 (43% of all value created), which is guaranteed to be large because the selector is optimising the exact quantity under measurement. Substituting PickScore, an independently trained and prompt-conditional preference model, cuts that share to +0.178. That substitution exposes the paper's actual finding, which is that the cost of selection to authorship comes from selecting by a reward that cannot read the prompt. The reranker's share of stated intent is -0.008 under LAION-Aesthetics and +0.017 under PickScore, and the same swap reverses the selection budget curve, where raising the budget from one candidate to thirty-two moves style realisation by -0.023 under LAION-Aesthetics and by +0.028 under PickScore while aesthetic score rises either way. Best-of-N is not intrinsically costly to intent. It is costly when the selector was never shown the brief. How much of the work is yours turns out to depend on two things the interface never displays: which currency you are counting in, and whether the component doing the choosing was ever told what you asked for.