Improvisation-the art of spontaneous creation that unfolds moment-to-moment without a scripted outcome-requires practitioners to continuously sense, adapt, and create anew. It is a fundamental mode of human creativity spanning music, dance, and everyday life. The open-ended nature of improvisation produces a stream of novel, unrepeatable moments-an aspect highly valued in artistic creativity. In parallel, open-endedness (OE)-a system's capacity for unbounded novelty and endless "interestingness"-is exemplified in natural or cultural evolution and has been considered "the last grand challenge" in artificial life (ALife). The rise of generative AI now raises the question in computational creativity (CC) research: What makes a "good" improvisation for AI? Can AI learn to improvise in a genuinely open-ended way? In this work-in-progress paper, we report insights from in-depth interviews with 6 experts in improvisation across dance, music, and contact improvisation. We draw systemic connections between human improvisational arts and the design of future experiential AI agents that could improvise alone or alongside humans-or even with other AI agents-embodying qualities of improvisation drawn from practice: active listening (umwelt and awareness), being in the time (mindfulness and ephemerality), embracing the unknown (source of randomness and serendipity), non-judgmental flow (acceptance and dynamical stability, balancing structure and surprise (unpredictable criticality at edge of chaos), imaginative metaphor (synaesthesia and planning), empathy, trust, boundary, and care (mutual theory of mind), and playfulness and intrinsic motivation (maintaining interestingness).

翻译：即兴创作——一种无需预设脚本、在瞬间展开的自发性创造艺术——要求实践者持续感知、适应并重新创造。它是人类在音乐、舞蹈及日常生活中一种根本性的创造力模式。即兴创作的开放性本质产生了一系列新颖且不可重复的瞬间——这一特质在艺术创造力中备受推崇。与此同时，开放性（OE）——一个系统产生无限新颖性与无尽“趣味性”的能力——在自然或文化演化中得以体现，并被视为人工生命（ALife）领域的“最后重大挑战”。生成式人工智能的兴起，如今在计算创造力（CC）研究中提出了一个问题：对于人工智能而言，何为“良好”的即兴创作？人工智能能否学会以真正开放的方式进行即兴创作？在这篇进展中的论文中，我们报告了对6位来自舞蹈、音乐及接触即兴领域的即兴创作专家进行深度访谈所获得的洞见。我们系统性地建立了人类即兴艺术与未来体验式人工智能代理设计之间的联系，这些代理能够单独或与人类——甚至与其他人工智能代理——共同进行即兴创作，并体现从实践中提炼的即兴特质：积极聆听（感知环境与意识）、沉浸于当下（正念与瞬时性）、拥抱未知（随机性与意外发现的来源）、无评判的流动（接纳与动态稳定性）、平衡结构与惊喜（混沌边缘的不可预测临界性）、富有想象力的隐喻（联觉与规划）、共情、信任、边界与关怀（相互心智理论），以及游戏性与内在动机（维持趣味性）。