When Teams Embrace AI

Studies of Generative AI (GenAI)-assisted creative workfows have focused on individuals overcoming challenges of prompting to produce what they envisioned. When designers work in teams, how do collaboration and prompting infuence each other, and how do users perceive generative AI and their collaborators during the co-prompting process? We engaged students with design or performance backgrounds, and little exposure to GenAI, to work in pairs with GenAI to create stage designs based on a creative theme. We found two patterns of collaborative prompting focused on generating story descriptions frst, or visual imagery frst. GenAI tools helped participants build consensus in the task, and allowed for discussion of the prompting strategies. Participants perceived GenAI as efcient tools rather than true collaborators, suggesting that human partners reduced the reliance on their use. This work highlights the importance of human-human collaboration when working with GenAI tools, suggesting systems that take advantage of shared human expertise in the prompting process.

Publication: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'24).