Invited Talk #5 by Pronita Mehrotra: Creativity as Learning - Designing AI to Expand Human Thought

Creativity and learning are often treated as separate human capacities, but they are essentially two sides of the same coin. Learning is not the passive accumulation of information but an active reconstruction of internal mental models. Similarly, creative thinking is the process of forming new connections, reframing existing structures, and generating novel possibilities from what we already know. In this talk, we will examine how cognitive moves that support human creativity, such as associative and analogical thinking, can also improve the originality of AI-generated ideas. This has important implications for the design of AI systems. Creativity research in AI should not be viewed only as an effort to make machines produce more novel outputs. Its bigger potential lies in helping humans learn better, think better, and develop the cognitive flexibility needed to approach complex problems in new ways. From this perspective, AI systems can be designed to provoke new directions of thought, rather than just knowledge acquisition. Done well, AI can be a cognitive thought partner: a system that helps humans strengthen higher order thinking skills, and learn faster and more deeply.