Exploration vs. Fixation: Scaffolding Divergent and Convergent Thinking for Human-AI Co-Creation with Generative Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Wen, Chao, Phung, Tung, Mehrotra, Pronita, Gulwani, Sumit, Beaty, Roger E., Nagashima, Tomohiro, Singla, Adish
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Wen, Chao
Phung, Tung
Mehrotra, Pronita
Gulwani, Sumit
Beaty, Roger E.
Nagashima, Tomohiro
Singla, Adish
author_facet Wen, Chao
Phung, Tung
Mehrotra, Pronita
Gulwani, Sumit
Beaty, Roger E.
Nagashima, Tomohiro
Singla, Adish
contents 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.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_18388
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploration vs. Fixation: Scaffolding Divergent and Convergent Thinking for Human-AI Co-Creation with Generative Models
Wen, Chao
Phung, Tung
Mehrotra, Pronita
Gulwani, Sumit
Beaty, Roger E.
Nagashima, Tomohiro
Singla, Adish
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
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.
title Exploration vs. Fixation: Scaffolding Divergent and Convergent Thinking for Human-AI Co-Creation with Generative Models
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18388