Creo: From One-Shot Image Generation to Progressive, Co-Creative Ideation
Directly addresses a fundamental HCI and generative AI challenge: how to design image generation systems that preserve user agency and creative intentionality rather than anchoring decisions prematurely.
AI Summary
Creo is a multi-stage text-to-image system that scaffolds image generation from rough sketches to high-resolution outputs, allowing users to maintain fine-grained control and creative agency throughout the process. The paper presents a comparative study showing that progressive generation with intermediate abstractions and decision-locking mechanisms increases user ownership, reduces output homogeneity, and improves controllability compared to one-shot generation.
Excerpt
Text-to-image (T2I) systems enable rapid generation of high-fidelity imagery but are misaligned with how visual ideas develop. T2I systems generate outputs that make implicit visual decisions on behalf of the user, often introduce fine-grained details that can anchor users prematurely and limit their ability to keep options open early on, and cause unintended changes during editing that are difficult to correct and reduce users' sense of control. To address these concerns, we present Creo, a mul