Influence of AI Use on Creativity-Related Perceptions and Outcomes in an Idea Generation Task

Engineering 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 domains, these fields have conflicting findings related to the impact of AI on idea novelty. Through a study of three groups of professional engineers and designers, we explore the relationships between dimensions of creativity and perceptions of creativity across different AI usage conditions during speculative design in a professional setting. Experts and designers assessed 120 ideas that were either fully human-generated, generated by humans using AI-as-tool, or fully AI-generated. In this context, AI use improved the well-craftedness and usefulness of ideas with no significant impact to novelty, although cosine similarity indicated that AI-generated ideas explored a smaller design space than the other conditions. Designers rated AI-generated ideas as less well-crafted and useful than experts, which may be indicative of ownership bias or “human favoritism” by the participants in this study. Additionally, designers who did not use AI displayed higher creative self-confidence, assessing their ideas as more well-crafted, novel, and useful compared to designers who used AI-as-tool. Overall findings indicate that AI use impacted various dimensions of creativity within this speculative design sprint, and while designer ratings often align with experts, perceptions of creativity can be biased by awareness of AI use.