Year: 2025
Type: preprint
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence holds significant potential to enhance human creativity. However, achieving this vision requires a clearer understanding of how such enhancement can be effectively realized. Drawing on a relational and distributed cognition perspective, we identify three fundamental modes by which AI can support and shape creative processes: Support, where AI acts as a tool; Synergy, where AI and humans collaborate in complementary ways; and Symbiosis, where human and AI cognition become so integrated that they form a unified creative system. These modes are defined along two key dimensions: the level of technical autonomy exhibited by the AI system (i.e., its ability to operate independently and make decisions without human intervention), and the degree of perceived agency attributed to it (i.e., the extent to which the AI is experienced as an intentional or creative partner). We examine how each configuration influences different levels of creativity from everyday problem solving to paradigm shifting innovation and discuss the implications for ethics, research, and the design of future human AI creative systems.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Institution: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4417349393
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: