Generative AI for the creation of images is becoming a staple in the toolkit of digital artists and visual designers. The interaction with these systems is mediated by \emph{prompting}, a process in which users write a short text to describe the desired image's content and style. The study of prompts offers an unprecedented opportunity to gain insight into the process of human creativity. Yet, our understanding of how people use them remains limited. We analyze more than 145,000 prompts from the logs of two Generative AI platforms (Stable Diffusion and Pick-a-Pic) to shed light on how people \emph{explore} new concepts over time, and how their exploration might be influenced by different design choices in human-computer interfaces to Generative AI. We find that users exhibit a tendency towards exploration of new topics over exploitation of concepts visited previously. However, a comparative analysis of the two platforms, which differ both in scope and functionalities, reveals some stark differences. Features diverting user focus from prompting and providing instead shortcuts for quickly generating image variants are associated with a considerable reduction in both exploration of novel concepts and detail in the submitted prompts. These results carry direct implications for the design of human interfaces to Generative AI and raise new questions regarding how the process of prompting should be aided in ways that best support creativity.

翻译：生成式AI用于图像创作正逐渐成为数字艺术家和视觉设计师工具箱中的标准配置。用户与这些系统的交互通过“提示”过程实现，即用户编写简短文本描述所需图像的内容和风格。提示研究为洞察人类创造力过程提供了前所未有的机会。然而，我们对人们如何使用提示的理解仍然有限。我们分析了两个生成式AI平台（Stable Diffusion和Pick-a-Pic）日志中超过145,000条提示，以揭示人们如何随时间“探索”新概念，以及这种探索可能如何受到生成式AI人机界面不同设计选择的影响。我们发现，用户倾向于探索新主题，而非重复利用之前接触过的概念。然而，对这两个在范围和功能上存在差异的平台进行对比分析后，发现了一些显著差异。那些将用户注意力从提示编写转移开，转而提供快速生成图像变体捷径的功能，与用户提交提示中新概念探索程度和细节丰富度的显著降低相关。这些结果直接影响了生成式AI人机界面的设计，并提出了关于如何以最佳方式支持创造力的提示过程辅助的新问题。