Exploration vs. Fixation: Scaffolding Divergent and Convergent Thinking for Human-AI Co-Creation with Generative Models
This addresses the issue of limited creativity in AI-assisted content creation for users, though it is incremental as it builds on existing interface improvements.
The paper tackles the problem of generative AI interfaces causing premature design fixation by introducing HAICo, a human-AI co-creation system that structures creative image generation into divergent and convergent modes, and shows it outperforms ChatGPT in creativity and usability in a study with 24 participants.
Generative AI has democratized content creation, but popular chatbot-based interfaces often prioritize execution, generating fully rendered artifacts right away. This issue can lead to premature convergence and design fixation, where users are being anchored to initial outputs. Recent works have proposed new interfaces to address this issue by supporting exploration, though typically constrained to be semantically close to a user's initial task framing, potentially limiting the creativity of the outcomes. We examine an approach grounded in the Geneplore model of creative cognition and instantiate it in a human-AI co-creation system, HAICo, for creative image generation. HAICo explicitly structures the creative process into two switchable modes: DIVERGENT mode scaffolds the broad exploration of remote conceptual ideas; CONVERGENT mode supports a targeted refinement of selected ideas. Through a within-subjects study (N=24) on a poster image creation task, we demonstrate that HAICo outperforms ChatGPT across multiple dimensions of creativity and usability. Our results highlight the critical need to shift from pure execution-focused chatbots to scaffolded co-creation systems that actively guide exploration and foster the creative process.