Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are increasingly being integrated into creative industries. While generative AI has enormous potential to transform creative work, current tools pose significant risks. For example, use of AI assistants can lead to less innovative ideas, fewer opportunities for skill-development, and reduced feelings of ownership over creative products. To prioritize human creativity and increase human capacity for innovation, this project will design and study a set of generative AI assistants that amplify, rather than replace, human creativity, pushing creative workers to think expansively and develop high quality ideas. This project will achieve this aim by designing tools that employ “generative friction” to foster reflection during the creative process; for example, by critiquing and reframing ideas or generating surprising outcomes. The project will result in a set of novel open-source AI assistants, broadening access to AI that supports creative practice, and novel curricula to build AI literacy among students pursuing creative careers. This work will provide critical insights into how to re-center human creativity as AI is integrated in creative industries. This project advocates for a novel paradigm for designing generative AI assistants for creative practice. The investigators will engage in iterative research-through-design to create a set of four novel AI assistants that leverage generative friction, an oppositional force that emerges from difficulty, surprise, and material or technical constraints that lead a creator to insight, as a mechanism for fostering reflection in creative practice. A within-subjects study will be conducted with 80 digital media artists to investigate how generative friction impacts artists’ creative processes and sense of agency and ownership. In addition, the investigators will conduct a longitudinal diary study with 2 digital media artists to iteratively develop a theoretical model of how gener