Unlocking Collective Potential: Modeling Creativity in Human-AI Teams

Humans naturally excel at identifying novel problems and developing creative solutions for both personal use and adaptation by a wider audience. Though not as creative, AI can augment human endeavors through its diverse and enhanced capabilities. Though innately creative, human skills and knowledge might restrict them from realizing their creative thought and verifying its novelty. AI, on the other hand, is not as creative. With its inability to interact with the environment and humans as a human would, it cannot recognize problems that would necessitate a novel solution. However, AI can augment and complement human skills and capabilities. Recognizing the creative potential of humans and AI working together in teams, we propose a model for human-AI team (HAT) creativity. Our model illustrates how AI teammates can contribute to and mediate creative processes in multi-human HATs. We describe human and AI teammates’ contributions in each of the four phases of the creative process: problem identification, wandering, hands-on, and verification, whilst highlighting how HAT contribution surpasses human or AI teammates alone. Our model also establishes that AI teammates can further support human teammates’ participation in team creativity by promoting their creative confidence. With this model, we showcase how AI can be utilized in human creative ventures whilst ensuring humans still are an important part of the process, evoking control and ownership of the creative process.