  Recent neural generation systems have demonstrated the potential for
procedurally generating game content, images, stories, and more. However, most
neural generation algorithms are "uncontrolled" in the sense that the user has
little say in creative decisions beyond the initial prompt specification.
Co-creative, mixed-initiative systems require user-centric means of influencing
the algorithm, especially when users are unlikely to have machine learning
expertise. The key to co-creative systems is the ability to communicate ideas
and intent from the user to the agent, as well as from the agent to the user.
Key questions in co-creative AI include: How can users express their creative
intentions? How can creative AI systems communicate their beliefs, explain
their moves, or instruct users to act on their behalf? When should creative AI
systems take initiative? The answer to such questions and more will enable us
to develop better co-creative systems that make humans more capable of
expressing their creative intents. We introduce CREATIVE-WAND, a customizable
framework for investigating co-creative mixed-initiative generation.
CREATIVE-WAND enables plug-and-play injection of generative models and
human-agent communication channels into a chat-based interface. It provides a
number of dimensions along which an AI generator and humans can communicate
during the co-creative process. We illustrate the CREATIVE-WAND framework by
using it to study one dimension of co-creative communication-global versus
local creative intent specification by the user-in the context of storytelling.
