Designing Creative AI Partners with COFI: A Framework for Modeling Interaction in Human-AI Co-Creative Systems
This work addresses a gap in co-creativity research by shifting focus from AI abilities to interaction design, potentially enhancing collaboration for users in creative fields, though it is incremental as it builds on existing systems.
The paper tackles the lack of research on interaction design in human-AI co-creative systems by developing the COFI framework, which models interaction possibilities and was applied to categorize 92 existing systems, identifying opportunities for improved communication and partnerships.
Human-AI co-creativity involves both humans and AI collaborating on a shared creative product as partners. In a creative collaboration, interaction dynamics, such as turn-taking, contribution type, and communication, are the driving forces of the co-creative process. Therefore the interaction model is a critical and essential component for effective co-creative systems. There is relatively little research about interaction design in the co-creativity field, which is reflected in a lack of focus on interaction design in many existing co-creative systems. The primary focus of co-creativity research has been on the abilities of the AI. This paper focuses on the importance of interaction design in co-creative systems with the development of the Co-Creative Framework for Interaction design (COFI) that describes the broad scope of possibilities for interaction design in co-creative systems. Researchers can use COFI for modeling interaction in co-creative systems by exploring alternatives in this design space of interaction. COFI can also be beneficial while investigating and interpreting the interaction design of existing co-creative systems. We coded a dataset of existing 92 co-creative systems using COFI and analyzed the data to show how COFI provides a basis to categorize the interaction models of existing co-creative systems. We identify opportunities to shift the focus of interaction models in co-creativity to enable more communication between the user and AI leading to human-AI partnerships.