Where Do I 'Add the Egg'?: Exploring Agency and Ownership in AI Creative Co-Writing Systems

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15440v1
• Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2025 21:27:12 GMT
• Title: Where Do I 'Add the Egg'?: Exploring Agency and Ownership in AI Creative Co-Writing Systems
• Authors: Dashiel Carrera, Jeb Thomas-Mitchell, Daniel Wigdor,
• Abstract summary: We develop three AI co-writing systems with distinct interface metaphors: agentic, tool-like, and magical.<n>Our analysis resulted in a taxonomy of agency and ownership subtypes.<n>We argue that interface metaphors not only guide expectations of control but also frame conceptions of authorship.
• Score: 3.9395748902870174
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: AI co-writing systems challenge long held ideals about agency and ownership in the creative process, thereby hindering widespread adoption. In order to address this, we investigate conceptions of agency and ownership in AI creative co-writing. Drawing on insights from a review of commercial systems, we developed three co-writing systems with identical functionality but distinct interface metaphors: agentic, tool-like, and magical. Through interviews with professional and non-professional writers (n = 18), we explored how these metaphors influenced participants' sense of control and authorship. Our analysis resulted in a taxonomy of agency and ownership subtypes and underscore how tool-like metaphors shift writers' expected points of control while agentic metaphors foreground conceptual contributions. We argue that interface metaphors not only guide expectations of control but also frame conceptions of authorship. We conclude with recommendations for the design of AI co-writing systems, emphasizing how metaphor shapes user experience and creative practice.

Related papers

• Beyond Pixels: Visual Metaphor Transfer via Schema-Driven Agentic Reasoning [56.24016465596292]
  A visual metaphor constitutes a high-order form of human creativity, employing cross-domain semantic fusion to transform abstract concepts into impactful visual rhetoric.<n>We introduce the task of Visual Metaphor Transfer (VMT), which challenges models to autonomously decouple the "creative essence" from a reference image and re-materialize that abstract logic onto a user-specified subject.<n>Our method significantly outperforms SOTA baselines in metaphor consistency, analogy appropriateness, and visual creativity, paving the way for automated high-impact creative applications in advertising and media.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-01T17:01:36Z)
• ThematicPlane: Bridging Tacit User Intent and Latent Spaces for Image Generation [49.805992099208595]
  We introduce ThematicPlane, a system that enables users to navigate and manipulate high-level semantic concepts.<n>This interface bridges the gap between tacit creative intent and system control.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-08-08T06:57:14Z)
• Co-Writing with AI, on Human Terms: Aligning Research with User Demands Across the Writing Process [17.275752224799497]
  We identify four overarching design strategies for AI writing support.<n>Our findings reveal that writers' desired levels of AI intervention vary across the writing process.<n>Our findings offer actionable design guidance for developing human-centered writing tools for co-writing with AI.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-04-16T21:05:46Z)
• Funhouse Mirror or Echo Chamber? A Methodological Approach to Teaching Critical AI Literacy Through Metaphors [0.0]
  This study proposes a methodological approach combining Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) with UNESCO's AI competency framework to develop Critical AI Literacy (CAIL) We identify and suggest four key metaphors for teaching CAIL. This includes GenAI as an echo chamber, GenAI as a funhouse mirror, GenAI as a black box magician, and GenAI as a map.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-11-22T05:01:11Z)
• Agents' Room: Narrative Generation through Multi-step Collaboration [54.98886593802834]
  We propose a generation framework inspired by narrative theory that decomposes narrative writing into subtasks tackled by specialized agents.<n>We show that Agents' Room generates stories preferred by expert evaluators over those produced by baseline systems.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-03T15:44:42Z)
• Assistant, Parrot, or Colonizing Loudspeaker? ChatGPT Metaphors for Developing Critical AI Literacies [0.9012198585960443]
  This study explores how discussing metaphors for AI can help build awareness of the frames that shape our understanding of AI systems. We analyzed metaphors from a range of sources, and reflected on them individually according to seven questions. We explored each metaphor along the dimension whether or not it was promoting anthropomorphizing, and to what extent such metaphors imply that AI is sentient.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-01-15T15:15:48Z)
• MetaCLUE: Towards Comprehensive Visual Metaphors Research [43.604408485890275]
  We introduce MetaCLUE, a set of vision tasks on visual metaphor. We perform a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art models in vision and language based on our annotations. We hope this work provides a concrete step towards developing AI systems with human-like creative capabilities.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-12-19T22:41:46Z)
• Telling Creative Stories Using Generative Visual Aids [52.623545341588304]
  We asked writers to write creative stories from a starting prompt, and provided them with visuals created by generative AI models from the same prompt. Compared to a control group, writers who used the visuals as story writing aid wrote significantly more creative, original, complete and visualizable stories. Findings indicate that cross modality inputs by AI can benefit divergent aspects of creativity in human-AI co-creation, but hinders convergent thinking.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-10-27T23:13:47Z)
• Metaphor Generation with Conceptual Mappings [58.61307123799594]
  We aim to generate a metaphoric sentence given a literal expression by replacing relevant verbs. We propose to control the generation process by encoding conceptual mappings between cognitive domains. We show that the unsupervised CM-Lex model is competitive with recent deep learning metaphor generation systems.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-06-02T15:27:05Z)
• Towards Socially Intelligent Agents with Mental State Transition and Human Utility [97.01430011496576]
  We propose to incorporate a mental state and utility model into dialogue agents. The hybrid mental state extracts information from both the dialogue and event observations. The utility model is a ranking model that learns human preferences from a crowd-sourced social commonsense dataset.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-03-12T00:06:51Z)
• Conceptual Metaphors Impact Perceptions of Human-AI Collaboration [29.737986509769808]
  We find that metaphors that signal low competence lead to better evaluations of the agent than metaphors that signal high competence. A second study confirms that intention to adopt decreases rapidly as competence projected by the metaphor increases. These results suggest that projecting competence may help attract new users, but those users may discard the agent unless it can quickly correct with a lower competence metaphor.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-08-05T18:39:56Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.