Hybrid Human-AI Creativity: Navigating the Affordance Landscape of Creative Exploration

The rapid emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) systems capable of producing text, images, music, and design artifacts has intensified debates about the nature of creativity and the locus of creative agency. Current discussions often frame these technologies either as replacing human creativity or as merely augmenting human creative processes. Such perspectives remain theoretically limited because they conceptualize creativity primarily as an individual cognitive ability rather than a distributed process embedded within sociocultural and material environments. Drawing on ecological approaches to cognition and contemporary creativity research, this paper proposes a conceptual framework that reconceptualizes human-AI creativity as navigation within an expanded affordance landscape. Integrating classical creativity process models with sociocultural and distributed perspectives, GenAI systems are conceptualized as affordance-modulating artifacts that reshape the topology of creative exploration. The framework explains how generative systems expand ideational possibility through rapid combinatorial generation while also influencing creative trajectories through algorithmic anchoring. Eight theoretical propositions link AI-mediated affordances to stages of the creative process. The paper extends distributed creativity theory to technologically mediated environments and outlines a research agenda for empirically investigating hybrid human-AI creativity systems.