TraitSpaces: Towards Interpretable Visual Creativity for Human-AI Co-Creation
This work addresses the need for interpretable tools to support human-AI co-creation in art, though it is incremental in linking cultural insights with computational modeling.
The paper tackled the problem of modeling visual creativity by defining 12 traits based on psychology and artist interviews, and predicted these traits from CLIP embeddings with reliability up to R² ≈ 0.68, while identifying challenges like Memory Imprint.
We introduce a psychologically grounded and artist-informed framework for modeling visual creativity across four domains: Inner, Outer, Imaginative, and Moral Worlds. Drawing on interviews with practicing artists and theories from psychology, we define 12 traits that capture affective, symbolic, cultural, and ethical dimensions of creativity.Using 20k artworks from the SemArt dataset, we annotate images with GPT 4.1 using detailed, theory-aligned prompts, and evaluate the learnability of these traits from CLIP image embeddings. Traits such as Environmental Dialogicity and Redemptive Arc are predicted with high reliability ($R^2 \approx 0.64 - 0.68$), while others like Memory Imprint remain challenging, highlighting the limits of purely visual encoding. Beyond technical metrics, we visualize a "creativity trait-space" and illustrate how it can support interpretable, trait-aware co-creation - e.g., sliding along a Redemptive Arc axis to explore works of adversity and renewal. By linking cultural-aesthetic insights with computational modeling, our work aims not to reduce creativity to numbers, but to offer shared language and interpretable tools for artists, researchers, and AI systems to collaborate meaningfully.