It's got to be a combination of both (e.g. made from wood and shaped like a ball but feels like this in this room etc) but maybe that is too neurotic and not conducive to new aesthetic experience. I think my pattern recognition for generative art would be quite high based on how many times I've seen it as a style of art previously. For most images i've seen DALL-E has all of the fingerprints of generative art and on some level I notice that even if the fidelity is approaching something that takes over aesthetically (e.g. where those kinds of perceptual fingerprints fade away a little bit).