Rethinking Creative Process with AI's Current Role and Future Potential

The creative industry is transforming with artificial intelligence (AI) development, reshaping how designers and artists approach their work. While AI offers data-driven insights that lead to unprecedented efficiency and foster novel cross-disciplinary creative flows, whether it serves as an enhancer or a diminisher of human creativity remains a subject of debate. This paper examines AI's evolving influence on design creativity. This paper emphasizes AI's role as a collaborator rather than a substitute for human ingenuity. It investigates how students and professionals across diverse creative and generative disciplines engage with AI, revealing nuanced perspectives on its benefits, challenges, and ethical considerations through case study and survey data. The study collected data through a combination of desk research and structured questionnaires to identify patterns of AI usage, user satisfaction levels, and future expectations. The findings reveal that while AI certainly boosts efficiency and aids in the iterative design process, it still cannot replace creative processes that mimic essential human qualities like intuition, emotional nuance, and creative originality in concepts. Participants' reliance on AI varied significantly and was shaped by factors such as their professional expertise, cultural perspectives on technology, and familiarity with emerging tools. Rather than assessing technical aspects of AI tools that are applied in design workflows, this study contextualizes AI's role within the creative process, thereby addressing a gap in design creativity literature, contributing to the ongoing ethical discourse on the developments of AI, and proposing strategies that prioritize human-AI collaboration to preserve and elevate the creative potential of designers.