Meta Research

As a first step towards studying the ability of human crowds and machines to effectively co-create, we explore several human-only collaborative co-creation scenarios. The goal in each scenario is to create a digital sketch using a simple web interface. We find that settings in which multiple humans iteratively add strokes and vote on the best additions result in sketches with the highest creativity (combination of value and novelty). Lack of collaboration leads to a higher variance in quality and lower novelty or surprise. Collaboration without voting leads to high novelty but low quality.