Pencils to Pixels: A Systematic Study of Creative Drawings across Children, Adults and AI

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nath, Surabhi S, Schröder, Guiomar del Cuvillo y, Stevenson, Claire E.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Nath, Surabhi S
Schröder, Guiomar del Cuvillo y
Stevenson, Claire E.
author_facet Nath, Surabhi S
Schröder, Guiomar del Cuvillo y
Stevenson, Claire E.
contents Can we derive computational metrics to quantify visual creativity in drawings across intelligent agents, while accounting for inherent differences in technical skill and style? To answer this, we curate a novel dataset consisting of 1338 drawings by children, adults and AI on a creative drawing task. We characterize two aspects of the drawings -- (1) style and (2) content. For style, we define measures of ink density, ink distribution and number of elements. For content, we use expert-annotated categories to study conceptual diversity, and image and text embeddings to compute distance measures. We compare the style, content and creativity of children, adults and AI drawings and build simple models to predict expert and automated creativity scores. We find significant differences in style and content in the groups -- children's drawings had more components, AI drawings had greater ink density, and adult drawings revealed maximum conceptual diversity. Notably, we highlight a misalignment between creativity judgments obtained through expert and automated ratings and discuss its implications. Through these efforts, our work provides, to the best of our knowledge, the first framework for studying human and artificial creativity beyond the textual modality, and attempts to arrive at the domain-agnostic principles underlying creativity. Our data and scripts are available on GitHub.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_05999
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pencils to Pixels: A Systematic Study of Creative Drawings across Children, Adults and AI
Nath, Surabhi S
Schröder, Guiomar del Cuvillo y
Stevenson, Claire E.
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Can we derive computational metrics to quantify visual creativity in drawings across intelligent agents, while accounting for inherent differences in technical skill and style? To answer this, we curate a novel dataset consisting of 1338 drawings by children, adults and AI on a creative drawing task. We characterize two aspects of the drawings -- (1) style and (2) content. For style, we define measures of ink density, ink distribution and number of elements. For content, we use expert-annotated categories to study conceptual diversity, and image and text embeddings to compute distance measures. We compare the style, content and creativity of children, adults and AI drawings and build simple models to predict expert and automated creativity scores. We find significant differences in style and content in the groups -- children's drawings had more components, AI drawings had greater ink density, and adult drawings revealed maximum conceptual diversity. Notably, we highlight a misalignment between creativity judgments obtained through expert and automated ratings and discuss its implications. Through these efforts, our work provides, to the best of our knowledge, the first framework for studying human and artificial creativity beyond the textual modality, and attempts to arrive at the domain-agnostic principles underlying creativity. Our data and scripts are available on GitHub.
title Pencils to Pixels: A Systematic Study of Creative Drawings across Children, Adults and AI
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05999