Towards Artificial Intelligence Serving as an Inspiring Co-Creation Partner

The promise of artificial intelligence (AI), in particular its latest developments in deep learning, has been influencing all kinds of disciplines such as engineering, business, agriculture, and humanities. More recently it also includes disciplines that were “reserved” to humans such as art and design. While there is a strong debate going on if creativity is profoundly human, we want to investigate if creativity can be enhanced by AI—not replaced. To be an inspiring co-creation partner by suggesting unexpected design variations and by learning the designer’s taste. To do so we adopted AI algorithms, which can be trained by a small sample set of shapes of a given object, to propose novel shapes. The evaluation of our proposed methods revealed that it can be used by trained designers as well as non-designers to support the design process in different phases and that it could lead to novel designs not intended/foreseen. Besides the potentials of AI, we also point out and discuss moral threads caused by the latest developments in AI with respect to the creative sector.