Remote associations play a crucial role in enhancing creativity during design ideation, yet designers face challenges in effectively creating and integrating them. Our formative study (N = 5) shows the potential of AI-generated remote associations to facilitate this process, but there are still challenges to understand and apply them. To address these, we propose StarBurst, which supports design ideation through AI-generated remote associations. It consists of three core components: (1) generating diverse remote associations from images to expand creative possibilities; (2) constructing an attribute map to explore connections between associative elements; and (3) providing suggestions to integrate these associations into the final design idea. Through two forms of user studies (N = 32, N = 16), we found that StarBurst outperformed designers in generating remote associations and provided more effective support for diverse and creative idea development compared to the baseline system. Additionally, we discussed how users’ usage patterns and perceptions influence StarBurst’s effectiveness.

AI literacy is critical for young children as AI is rapidly integrated into people’s daily lives. However, the complexity of AI knowledge presents significant learning challenges, and there is currently a lack of effective approaches for converting complex AI concepts into easy-comprehend content. Based on the formative analysis, we propose Hello!AI, an interactive rhyme-based AI literacy education game targeted at children in Grades 2–6 of primary schools. Hello!AI comprises 3 modules: (i) Algorithm Adventure, focusing on basic AI concept learning, (ii) Algorithm Handbook, promoting thinking and reflection on AI algorithms, and (iii) City Builder, emphasizing the application of AI algorithm to solve real-life problems. We developed the prototype system, iterated it through pilot study, and then conducted a user study. The results demonstrate that Hello!AI can effectively engage children and, to a certain extent, improve their ability to understand and apply AI knowledge, as well as their thinking and reflective capabilities regarding AI technologies.

In the era of widespread digital art dissemination, visible watermarks provide immediate copyright identification by overlaying visible markers, addressing the lag issue of invisible watermarks that are difficult to prevent in advance due to post hoc evidence collection, thus meeting artists' needs for preemptive prevention and explicit protection. However, existing approaches struggle to balance aesthetics and functionality. To address this challenge, we conducted an exploratory study with watermarking experts, identifying key principles, six common design patterns, and a systematic watermarking workflow. Based on these insights, we developed an end-to-end, perceptual-aware framework for aesthetic-preserving watermark embedding, modeled after expert workflows in 5 phases. Using the Chain-of-Thought strategy, we optimized prompt instructions to guide the Vision-Language Model in emulating experts' decision-making, generating effective watermarking schemes and conducting objective visual evaluations. Iterative feedback optimization ensures watermarked images adhere to aesthetic principles. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the system's superiority over baseline methods in preserving aesthetics and ensuring effective copyright protection.

This paper presents CrePoster, a data-driven framework to generate aesthetic posters for Chinese cultural relics, aiming to enhance the exhibition experience and promote cultural spread. CrePoster comprises three modules: (1) object segmentation module, (2) content generation module, and (3) poster generation module. Upon processing a cultural relic image, the object segmentation module first leverages a cascaded U2Net-SAM structure to obtain the visual target. Secondly, the content generation module utilizes a multi-target learning-enabled caption generator to produce professional captions. Thirdly, the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) based poster generation module adaptively creates aesthetic parameters, including layout and color scheme, ultimately rendering them into refined posters.

The unique artistic style is crucial to artists’ occupational competitiveness, yet prevailing Art Commission Platforms rarely support style-based retrieval. Meanwhile, the fast-growing generative AI techniques aggravate artists’ concerns about releasing personal artworks to public platforms. To achieve artistic style-based retrieval without exposing personal artworks, we propose FedStyle, a style-based federated learning crowdsourcing framework. It allows artists to train local style models and share model parameters rather than artworks for collaboration. However, most artists possess a unique artistic style, resulting in severe model drift among them. FedStyle addresses such extreme data heterogeneity by having artists learn their abstract style representations and align with the server, rather than merely aggregating model parameters lacking semantics. Besides, we introduce contrastive learning to meticulously construct the style representation space, pulling artworks with similar styles closer and keeping different ones apart in the embedding space. Extensive experiments on the proposed datasets demonstrate the superiority of FedStyle.

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.

Increasing artwork plagiarism incidents stresses the urgent need for proper copyright protection on behalf of the creators. The latest development in this context focuses on embedding watermarks via deep encoder-decoder networks. However, we find that deep watermarking has a serious vulnerability on its robustness when facing deliberate plagiarism. To manifest it, we construct an attack that misuses watermarking encoder as a plagiarism lookout for bypassing copyright detection. As a remedy, we propose a patch-level deep watermarking framework (DIPW) to retain copyright evidence in essential patches with plagiarism resistance, inspired by a user study observation that subject elements in artworks are the principal plagiarism entities. Technically, DIPW adaptively finds the embedding patches by identifying a subset of non-overlapping and feature-rich objects; and tailors the model with dual-distortion losses and adversarial plagiarism noise injection for robustness. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of DIPW in facilitating better robustness, secrecy, and imperceptibility with acceptable time burden.

The wide sharing and rapid dissemination of digital artworks has aggravated the issues of plagiarism, raising significant concerns in cultural preservation and copyright protection. Yet, modes of plagiarism are formally uncharted, causing rough plagiarism detection practices with duplicate checking. This work is thus devoted to understanding artwork plagiarism, with poster design as the running case, for building more dedicated detection techniques. As the first study of such, we elaborate on 8 elements that form unique posters and 6 judgement criteria for plagiarism using an exploratory study with designers. Second, we build a novel poster dataset with plagiarism annotations according to the criteria. Third, we propose models, leveraging the combination of primary elements and criteria of plagiarism, to find suspect instances in a retrieval process. The models are trained under the context of modern artwork and evaluated on the poster plagiarism dataset. The proposal is shown to outperform the baseline with superior Top-K accuracy (~33%) and retrieval performance (~42%).