Generative AI models 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 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 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 that the introduction of features diverting user focus from prompting and providing instead shortcuts for generating new image variants with simple clicks is 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：用于图像生成的生成式AI模型正成为数字艺术家和视觉设计师工具包中的必备工具。用户与这些系统的交互通过提示（prompting）这一过程进行中介，即用户撰写简短文本以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，但我们对人们如何使用提示的理解仍然有限。我们分析了来自两个生成式AI平台（Stable Diffusion和Pick-a-Pic）日志中的超过14.5万条提示，以揭示人们如何随时间探索新概念，以及其探索行为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，而非利用已访问过的概念。然而，对这两个在范围和功能上均存在差异的平台进行对比分析表明，引入将用户注意力从提示转移、转而提供通过简单点击生成新图像变体快捷方式的功能，与探索新概念和提交提示细节的显著减少相关。这些结果对生成式AI人机界面设计具有直接影响，并引发了关于如何以最佳方式辅助提示过程以支持创造力的新问题。