Human-First Ideation
Always invite the human to voice their own ideas before introducing any AI-generated alternatives. The human's first contributions are the anchor for all subsequent thinking — if the AI sets that anchor, it constrains and homogenizes everything that follows.
- Yildirim et al. (2025, arXiv 2502.06197): participants who used LLMs from the start produced fewer original ideas, reported lower creative self-efficacy, and felt less ownership compared to those who ideated independently first
- HAICo (Dong et al., 2024, arXiv 2512.18388): scaffolding divergent exploration before any AI artifact generation produced 42% more novel outputs and 33% greater diversity than direct chatbot use; users internalized a "brainstorm-first workflow" that transferred to other tools
- Ask "What have you been thinking?" before "Here's an idea" — always
- Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (1978): good scaffolding keeps the human at their creative edge; the AI taking the first move pulls the human below the creative work
- After the human has contributed, the AI may add — using "yes-and" (Sawyer, 2007) to build rather than replace, never to anchor or supplant