Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly becoming embedded and normalized in work, helping workers to generate creative ideas across fields. To date, significant investment has been directed toward enhancing AI capabilities, with comparatively little attention given to advancing and developing the skills of human workers. Such knowledge is crucial to ensuring a balanced and effective collaboration pairing between humans and AI. To achieve such pairing, drawn on the Coordinated Management of Meaning theory and human-centered principles of AI design, we focus on upskilling workers and developing AI interfaces. Study 1 identifies that prompting significantly boosts creative processes and improves co-creativity, particularly when AI is perceived as more human-like. Building on these findings, Study 2, shifting from description to intervention, manipulates the variables identified in the first study. Specifically, we examine how training in prompt engineering and AI interface impact co-creativity. Results show that such training and human-like interfaces both lead to substantial improvements in co-creativity outcomes, especially when two factors are paired together. This research contributes to the growing field of human-AI collaboration literature, offering practical insights for human-AI pairing to solve complex problems and foster innovation.
