DeepThInk: Designing and Probing Human-AI Co-creation in Digital Art Therapy

Abstract

Art therapy has been an essential form of psychotherapy to facilitate psychological well-being, which has been promoted and transformed by recent technological advances into digital art therapy. However, the potential of digital technologies has not been fully leveraged; especially, applying AI technologies in digital art therapy is still under-explored. In this paper, we propose DeepThInk, an AI-infused art-making system collaborated with five experienced registered art therapists over ten months, to investigate the potential of introducing a human-AI co-creative process into art therapy. DeepThInk offers a range of tools which can lower the expertise threshold for art-making while improving users’ creativity and expressivity. We validated DeepThInk through expert reviews and a two-part user evaluation with both synchronous and asynchronous therapy setups. This longitudinal iterative design process helped us derive and contextualize design principles of human-AI co-creation for art therapy, shedding light on future design in relevant domains.