Influence of AI Use on Creativity in a Speculative Design Process
Designing future worlds in a speculative design process requires creative ideas. Speculative design has ties to both engineering design and creative writing, and while AI use has been found to impact the creativity of ideas in both fields, these field have conflicting findings on whether AI increases or decreases idea novelty. We move beyond this paradox to explore the relationships between dimensions of creativity across different AI usage conditions in a speculative design context. Experts assessed 120 ideas from a Futures Wheel speculative design activity in a professional setting, where the ideas were either human-generated, generated by humans using AI-as-tool, or AI-generated. The creativity ratings, word count, and local similarity were compared between each condition, and the correlations between each creativity category were calculated. Ideas that were AI-generated or generated using AI-as-tool were rated as more well-crafted than purely human-generated ideas, and AI-generated ideas were rated as more useful than ideas generated using AI-as-tool. There was no significant difference in the novelty of ideas. AI-generated ideas explored a smaller design space than the other conditions. We close with an assessment of the findings compared to prior work across fields and the implications for AI use in speculative design practice.
