HAI-GEN 2023: 4th Workshop on Human-AI Co-Creation with Generative Models
by Mary Lou Maher (University of North Carolina, Charlotte, US), Justin D. Weisz (IBM Research, US), Hendrik Strobelt (IBM Research, US), Lydia B. Chilton (Columbia University, US), and Werner Geyer (IBM Research, US)
Editor’s note: This article was updated on April 19 to include the workshop recording.
Recent advances in generative AI through deep learning approaches such as generative adversarial networks, multi-modal generation, and large language models such as GPT-4 are enabling new kinds of user experiences. People are now able to generate many types of content — text, images, audio, video, code — at an unprecedented level of fidelity. In many cases, the content generated by AI models is either indistinguishable from human-generated content or could not be produced by humans. This ability raises significant creative, societal, ethical, and organizational challenges.
The 4th Workshop on Human-AI Co-Creation with Generative Models, held at IUI 2023, brought together over 50 researchers and practitioners from the disciplines of HCI & AI to explore our understanding of the human-AI co-creative process and the opportunities and challenges of creating meaningful user experiences with deep generative models.
Workshop Summary
Philipp Schmitt, an artist and designer based in Brooklyn, USA opened the workshop by delivering a keynote that reflected on his use of generative AI technologies in the design of physical artifacts. He challenged the conventional practice of using generative models to create high-fidelity artifacts by showing how the generation of low-fidelity images was sufficient to stimulate peoples’ creative thinking. In this way, the “prompting” process was flipped: low-fidelity outputs of a generative model were used to prompt human designers into creating a novel collection of chairs, beginning with hand-drawn sketches, followed by small-scale and full-scale prototypes. Philip questioned the assumption and expectation that having larger and larger language models equals increased co-creativity as this may leave less room for human imagination, similarly discussed in a recent article by Annie Dorsen. He ended his keynote provocatively by asking us “Let’s do less!”
Following the keynote was the first paper session which included a lively discussion on topics exploring how people interact with generative AI systems.
- Mattias Rost and Sebastian Andreasson. Stable Walk: An interactive environment for exploring Stable Diffusion outputs
- Shuoyang Zheng. StyleGAN-Canvas: Augmenting StyleGAN3 for Real-Time Human-AI Co-Creation
- Juan Salamanca, Daniel Gómez-Marín, and Sergi Jordà. The Dynamic Creativity of Proto-artifacts in Generative Computational Co-creation
- Ibukun Olatunji. Why try to build a co-creative poetry system that makes people feel that they have “creative superpowers”?
Papers in the second session took a dive into critical research and design issues raised by the use of generative AI in creative tasks.
- Yiren Liu, Mengxia Yu, Meng Jiang, and Yun Huang. Creative Research Question Generation for Human-Computer Interaction Research
- Steven I. Ross, Michael Muller, Fernando Martinez, Stephanie Houde, and Justin D. Weisz. A Case Study in Engineering a Conversational Programming Assistant’s Persona
- Jeba Rezwana and Mary Lou Maher. User Perspectives of the Ethical Dilemmas of Ownership, Accountability, Leadership in Human-AI Co-Creation
- Justin D. Weisz, Michael Muller, Jessica He, and Stephanie Houde. Toward General Design Principles for Generative AI Applications
The workshop ended with a panel discussion on the topic of how large language models will impact human-AI co-creativity. The panelists were Katy Gero, Kaz Grace, and Jeba Rezwani, and it was moderated by Justin Weisz. The topics raised by the panelists provoked questions about how can AI support human authenticity and the intrinsic motivation of people to create their own voice, the concerns about conversational AI in dealing with the way humans ascribe contextual meanings for words that go beyond the conventional meaning, the reversal of the convention that humans prompt generative AI to suggest AI should prompt humans (echoing the keynote), and the call for ethical and responsible human-AI collaboration.
Get Involved
Generative AI technologies are rapidly maturing and being integrated into a variety of consumer and enterprise applications. Our workshop continued to explore the frontiers of human-AI co-creativity by exploring experimental user experiences, ethical dilemmas, design principles, and more. There are a number of upcoming events to get involved in this community:
- 📅 Join the Human-Centered Explainable AI the Generative AI and HCI workshops at CHI 2023, April 28–29. Registration is now open to all CHI attendees!
- 🧑🎨 Participate in the 14th International Conference on Computational Creativity. Short papers are due May 2.
