The Double-Edged Sword of Creative Control in Designer-AI Co-Creation with Design Experience as a Boundary Condition

As generative artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly involved in creative processes, designers encounter a fundamental tension regarding creative control—the degree to which they dominate design direction and iterative decision-making when collaborating with AI. Existing theories offer contradictory predictions: self-determination and psychological ownership theories emphasize the benefits of control, whereas cognitive load theory highlights its cognitive costs. This tension remains empirically unresolved, particularly regarding how designer characteristics shape these competing effects. This study examines the dual-pathway mechanism linking creative control to design creativity and investigates the moderating role of design experience. A scenario-based between-subjects experiment was conducted with 226 designers and design students. Creative control exerted a positive indirect effect on design creativity through psychological ownership (effect = 0.16, 95% CI 0.09, 0.24) and a negative indirect effect through cognitive load (effect = −0.07, 95% CI −0.14, −0.02), confirming the double-edged sword effect. Design experience strengthened the positive pathway while buffering the negative pathway. Creative control thus functions as a double-edged sword in designer-AI co-creation, with its net effect contingent on designer expertise. The results extend Conservation of Resources theory to human-AI collaboration contexts and inform the design of experience-adaptive AI-assisted systems.