From State Changes to Creative Decisions: Documenting and Interpreting Traces Across Creative Domains

Creative AI is moving from single-step asset generation toward long-horizon multimodal production. Although recent generative models can synthesize high-quality images, videos, audio clips, UI elements, storyboards, slides, and other creative assets, real-world creative work requires more than isolated prompt-output interactions. It involves references, drafts, alternatives, edits, failed attempts, version relations, tool actions, evaluation signals, and human feedback, which together form an evolving project state. Existing prompt-based, chat-based, and node-based generation systems only partially support this state, as they often discard intermediate context, rely on linear conversations, or require manually specified workflows. Recent commercial systems indicate a shift toward agent-assisted creative production, but their closed architectures make it difficult to study how agents represent context, choose tools, revise artifacts, recover from failures, and maintain consistency over time. To address this gap, we introduce JarvisHub, a canvas-native creative agent harness for long-horizon multimodal creation. JarvisHub treats an editable canvas as the user workspace, the agent's external memory, action space, and shared project state, representing multimodal artifacts, dependencies, versions, and feedback as typed canvas nodes and links. Through a three-layer architecture of canvas state, protocol bridge, and agent runtime, JarvisHub enables agents to act within an inspectable and editable creative state. This design moves creative agents beyond isolated tool use toward sustained, human-steerable creative automation, where agents can progressively plan, generate, revise, and organize multimodal projects while users remain able to inspect, guide, and intervene throughout the process.

Design is a non-linear, reflective process in which practitioners engage with visual, semantic, and other expressive materials to explore, iterate, and refine ideas. As Generative AI (GenAI) becomes integrated into professional design practice, traditional interaction approaches focusing on prompts or whole-image manipulation can misalign AI output with designers' intent, forcing visual thinkers into verbal reasoning or post-hoc adjustments. We present three interaction approaches from DesignPrompt, FusAIn, and DesignTrace that distribute control across intent, input, and process, enabling designers to guide AI alignment at different stages of interaction. We further argue that alignment is a dynamic negotiation, with AI adopting proactive or reactive roles according to designers' instrumental and inspirational needs and the creative stage.

Generative AI is becoming an important medium for artistic creation, yet existing interactions often assume that creators can specify intentions in advance and accurately communicate them through text prompts. Artistic intentions, however, may be vague, latent, or recognizable only after seeing concrete visual possibilities. We propose a human-AI co-creation paradigm beyond explicit intent expression. By expanding model exploration, we expose artists to diverse visual possibilities, allowing them to identify previously unarticulated preferences through observation, comparison, and selection. We then integrate artists' curatorial judgments into reinforcement learning, assigning different learning strengths based on preferences over generation trajectories, so recognized directions are more strongly reinforced and the model gradually adapts to individual aesthetics. This creates a continuous "explore-identify-shape-re-explore" loop in which artistic intent is progressively discovered, externalized, and shaped. Through three user studies, we examine latent-preference discovery, personalized preference alignment, and the externalization of vague, difficult-to-express creative intentions.