Smart "Error"! Exploring Imperfect AI to Support Creative Ideation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Designers widely accept AI as a partner in the design process for its efficient and intelligent decision-making. However, AI is often not perfect, and AI error often makes humans dumbfounded. Literature has pointed out the value of such AI error, while still leaving its inspiration essence and application strategies uncharted from the practice perspective. This work focuses on bridging the practice gap by looking into and exploiting the imaginative "mislabeled" objects of object detection models. To gain insights into the inspiration of AI "error", we collected a dedicated AI "error" dataset from object detection and invited eight designers to share divergent comments on the "mislabeled" objects. Coding was then performed on the comments, which summarizes the inspiration of AI "error" into six atomic dimensions. Subsequently, we took a step further to an exploratory study, a comparative ideation experiment with 20 designers, investigating how to apply these inspiration dimensions to create ideas. Questionnaire and interview results revealed that essential inspiration of AI "error" could positively activate creativity, especially the "Outline" dimension. A design model CETR is then formulated by summarizing the application of atomic inspiration of "error" into four forms of creativity, which could be taken as a guideline for cooperative design with AI "error". In addition, we also sketch two approaches to generate more inspiring and applicable AI "error", elaborate on two principal characteristics of AI "error" for promoting creativity, and propose three strategies for better co-creating with AI "error". Finally, we provide insight into design research about AI self-awareness and human-AI collaboration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".