Evaluating Creativity Support Tools via Homogenization Analysis

The evaluation of creativity support tools (CSTs)—software systems intended to support human creativity—remains an open problem, in part because creativity is fundamentally difficult to define and in part because different CSTs target a wide variety of different creative domains. We propose a new, general-purpose evaluation criterion for CSTs: namely, the extent to which a CST homogenizes the creative output of its users. We also demonstrate one way to conduct this kind of homogenization analysis, leveraging semantic similarity between embeddings of users' creative outputs to quantify the degree of homogenization that a CST induces.