HCC: Small: Towards Leveraging Generative AI to Support End-User Driven Creative Workforces in Technology

Generative AI systems such as ChatGPT and Midjourney have been increasingly used to produce music, text, art, and videos that approach the quality people can create. While these AI systems can be used to enhance people's own creative work, a widely voiced concern is how generative AI might replace human creative workforces and lead to significant ethical, legal, and social risks.

The project will study two growing communities focused on workers in creative entertainment industries to (a) get a deeper picture of both opportunities and challenges generative AI brings to creative workforces and (b) explore how generative AI can be designed to support creators rather than marginalizing them or harming their creative practices and careers. Because AI's role is still evolving in the creative sector, building this knowledge now has the potential to improve the future of creative work and productivity in the American economy.

This project addresses critical but understudied concerns at the intersection of generative AI and creative work through three phases. The first is empirically investigating how end-user driven creative workforces understand, perceive, and approach generative AI through qualitative interviews with creative technology workers and expert AI researchers and developers.

The second is identifying both opportunities and risks of generative AI for creative technology workers through co-designing novel AI features with creative workers to mitigate risks and reinforce opportunities. The third is prototyping and evaluating new AI features to help creative technology workers to navigate and cope with the new landscape of creative work in the age of AI.

The project team will also contribute to the wider public conversations around designing better AI-based systems for people through developing materials for public outreach and courses on human-computer interaction and human-centered AI.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.