Exploring the Possibilities of Human-AI Artistic Creativity: An Affective-Semiotic Cultural Perspective

The growing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into artistic and cultural practices has intensified debates about creativity and agency. This article examines human-AI creativity from an affective-semiotic cultural perspective grounded in Semiotic Cultural Psychology. It proposes a framework for understanding creativity as a culturally hybrid process shaped by the interaction of human meaning-making and algorithmic mediation. A distinction is drawn between experiential creativity, characteristic of human creative activity grounded in embodiment, affect, and cultural experience, and functional creativity, characteristic of AI systems that generate novelty through the statistical recombination of cultural repertoires. To explain the mechanisms underlying AI-generated production, the concepts of algorithmic canalization and statistical semiosis are introduced. Human-AI creativity is conceptualized as a distributed process in which algorithmic systems expand creative possibilities while human agency remains central to the interpretation, valuation, and transformation of meaning. The article concludes by discussing the implications of this framework for creativity, education, cultural development, and future research on human-AI collaboration.