Four Tiers of Human–AI Collaboration in Creative Work

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Sophie Liu

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Dec 9, 2025, 12:28:46 AM (12 days ago) Dec 9
to Computational Creativity Forum

Hi everyone,

We often talk about “using AI tools” in creative practice, but in many cases that still means treating AI as a slightly smarter assistant.

Think AI is just a smart assistant?

I’ve been working on a simple visual Four-Tier Framework of Human–AI Collaboration that tries to make our options more explicit. It lays out a progression:

  • Tier 1 – Smart Assistant

  • Tier 2 – Service Engine

  • Tier 3 – Specialized Collaborator

  • Tier 4 – Innovation Platform

The idea is to show how much more AI can actually do with us and for us as we move up the tiers – not just answering prompts, but supporting whole creative pipelines, co-shaping style and structure, and eventually acting as an innovation platform where humans and AI explore new creative spaces together. For more information, please visit: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17701769

I’d be very interested to hear: where you feel your current computational creative practice sits on this ladder, and what technical or conceptual shifts you think are needed to move from one tier to the next.

Best wishes,

Sophie

Four-Tier Framework for Human-AI Collaboration.jpg

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