What does the advent of AI mean for human creativity?

That is the focus of a new book, Generative Artificial Intelligence and Creativity: Precautions, Perspectives, and Possibilities, edited by Matthew J. Worwood and James C. Kaufman. And as it happens, Danah Henriksen, Lauren Woo, and I have a chapter in it, titled “Beyond Boundaries: Transdisciplinary Creativity with Generative Artificial Intelligence.“

This was a fun chapter to write, and frankly, to be included alongside influential names like Robert J. Sternberg, Todd Lubart, Maciej Karwowski, and Jonathan A. Plucker is both humbling and energizing.

What I appreciate most about this volume is its refusal to fall into either techno-utopianism or alarmist pessimism. The book acknowledges both AI’s expansive creative potential and its ethical, educational, and cognitive limits. The chapters cover a wide range of ideas but always remain clear-eyed about the challenges (hallucinations, biases, risks of overreliance, questions about student agency) while offering a vision of AI-augmented synthesis rather than automated creativity.

Our chapter serves as a bridge between theory and practice, reframing generative AI not merely as a creative instrument but as a partner in fostering transdisciplinary creativity—the synthesis of ideas and methods across domains. Building on Root-Bernstein’s framework, Danah and I had previously proposed seven transdisciplinary creative thinking skills: perceiving, patterning, abstracting, embodied thinking and empathizing, modeling, playing, and synthesis. In this chapter, we take each of these skills and explore how GenAI can support them through its multimodal, generative, and adaptive capacities, while stressing the indispensable role of human judgment in guiding, questioning, and contextualizing AI outputs.

One of the coolest parts of the chapter is how we ground this theoretical framework in concrete creative experiments that I have shared on this website. This includes creating scientific poetry about “twoness” in the challenging Double Dactyl form, developing typographical wordplay that discovered visual-linguistic designs, and co-creating an original song (Endless Sky) about living in an infinite universe.

You can find a pre-print version of the article at the link below.

Mishra, P., Henriksen, D., & Woo, L. J. (2025). Beyond boundaries: Transdisciplinary creativity with generative artificial intelligence. In M. Worwood & J. Kaufmann (Eds.), Generative artificial intelligence and creativity: Possibilities, precautions, and perspectives.