Dr. Jeanine Kirchner-Krath

eCo-CreAItion: Exploring Human-AI Co-Creativity for Sustainability Innovations

Digitalisation is influencing all areas of social and economic life, and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular, as a disruptive technology, is fundamentally changing how people work with technology. At the same time, we are facing critical social challenges that need to be solved with new ideas and a spirit of innovation. The integration of AI into creative processes, known as human-AI co-creativity, promises to open up new avenues for innovation in order to develop solutions to pressing challenges.

The ‘eCo-CreAItion’ research project addresses this potential and investigates how human-AI co-creativity can succeed for sustainability innovations in the context of developing sustainable business models. Psychological, ethical and technological perspectives on the co-creative process will be examined, motivational designs for co-creativity processes will be developed and evaluated on this basis, and finally the effect of such co-creative processes on the emergence of sustainability innovations will be analysed. In this way, the project expects technologically, economically and socially relevant results. From a technological perspective, new insights will be generated into the roles of AI systems and how human-AI collaboration processes can be designed to enable genuine creative partnerships in which AI not only assists as a digital support system, but also actively participates in the creative process. From an economic perspective, the project is developing important foundations for successful human-AI collaboration in a corporate context by identifying psychological and ethical factors that are crucial for a successful co-creation process and, building on this, developing new motivational design options for human-AI collaboration that can also be transferred beyond the project context to human-AI collaboration in organisations. From a societal perspective, the project provides an initial blueprint to show how AI can take creative processes to a new level and thus drive innovation processes to solve societal challenges.