Bright and Dark Imagining: How Creators Navigate Moral Consequences of Developing Ideas for Artificial Intelligence

Despite an emerging stream of work on negative behaviors associated with engaging in creativity, research on the consequences of creativity has largely focused on unleashing the proximal success of new ideas. Both approaches overlook the downstream potential for creative ideas to directly cause harm. Through an inductive, qualitative study of individuals creating artificial intelligence technologies, the present study shifts the conversation to how workers navigate potential distal moral consequences of ideas while engaging in creative work. Our study unveils that surprises during creative work catalyze a process of imagining future consequences of ideas, which shapes the way creators engage with moral issues and approach idea development. A key insight of our study is that imagining unfolds in two ways: (1) bright imagining is associated with disconnecting moral issues from idea development, so that creators develop ideas in the relative absence of constraints and moral issues are addressed through systematized safeguards; (2) dark imagining is associated with integrating moral issues into idea development, transforming morally motivated constraints into creative forces with potential to shape the nature of ideas themselves. Our study recasts interacting with moral consequences intertwined with creative ideas as itself a creative, constructive process.