Creative tasks require creators to iteratively produce, select, and discard potentially useful ideas. Now, creativity tools include generative AI features (e.g., Photoshop Generative Fill) that increase the number of alternatives creators consider through rapid experiments with prompts and random generations. Creators use tedious manual systems for organizing their prior ideas by saving file versions or hiding layers, but they lack the support they want for reusing prior alternatives in personal work or in communication with others. We present HistoryPalette, a system that supports exploration and reuse of prior designs in generative image creation and editing. Using HistoryPalette, creators and their collaborators explore a “palette” of prior design alternatives organized by spatial position, topic category, and creation time. HistoryPalette enables creators to quickly preview and reuse their prior work. In creative professional and client collaborator user studies, participants generated and edited images by exploring and reusing past design alternatives with HistoryPalette.

Short-form videos are popular on platforms like TikTok and Instagram as they quickly capture viewers' attention. Many creators repurpose their long-form videos to produce short-form videos, but creators report that planning, extracting, and arranging clips from long-form videos is challenging. Currently, creators make extractive short-form videos composed of existing long-form video clips or abstractive short-form videos by adding newly recorded narration to visuals. While extractive videos maintain the original connection between audio and visuals, abstractive videos offer flexibility in selecting content to be included in a shorter time. We present Lotus, a system that combines both approaches to balance preserving the original content with flexibility over the content. Lotus first creates an abstractive short-form video by generating both a short-form script and its corresponding speech, then matching long-form video clips to the generated narration. Creators can then add extractive clips with an automated method or Lotus's editing interface. Lotus's interface can be used to further refine the short-form video. We compare short-form videos generated by Lotus with those using an extractive baseline method. In our user study, we compare creating short-form videos using Lotus to participants' existing practice.

RemovalFigure 1: TalkLess's interface lets creators edit their speech by skimming and browsing the outline pane to determine regions to cut, using the compression pane editing the transcript directly or by selecting a global-or paragraph-level compression amount, and listening to the original or generated audio aligned to the transcript in the audio pane.

Compelling writing is tailored to its audience. This is challenging, as writers may struggle to empathize with readers, get feedback in time, or gain access to the target group. We propose a concept that generates on-demand feedback, based on writer-defined AI personas of any target audience. We explore this concept with a prototype (using GPT-3.5) in two user studies (N=5 and N=11): Writers appreciated the concept and strategically used personas for getting different perspectives. The feedback was seen as helpful and inspired revisions of text and personas, although it was often verbose and unspecific. We discuss the impact of on-demand feedback, the limited representativity of contemporary AI systems, and further ideas for defining AI personas. This work contributes to the vision of supporting writers with AI by expanding the socio-technical perspective in AI tool design: To empower creators, we also need to keep in mind their relationship to an audience.

We propose a text editor to help users plan, structure and reflect on their writing process. It provides continuously updated paragraph-wise summaries as margin annotations, using automatic text summarization. Summary levels range from full text, to selected (central) sentences, down to a collection of keywords. To understand how users interact with this system during writing, we conducted two user studies (N=4 and N=8) in which people wrote analytic essays about a given topic and article. As a key finding, the summaries gave users an external perspective on their writing and helped them to revise the content and scope of their drafted paragraphs. People further used the tool to quickly gain an overview of the text and developed strategies to integrate insights from the automated summaries. More broadly, this work explores and highlights the value of designing AI tools for writers, with Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities that go beyond direct text generation and correction.