Result-Oriented Generation Meets Process-Oriented Creation: Understanding the Tension Between Generative AI and Craft Practice

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping creative work, yet research focuses mainly on digital creation, with limited attention to embodied practices grounded in material interaction and physical making. Taking craft as an entry point, we examine GenAI in craft through a two-phase qualitative study with 28 practitioners across domains. We find a partial misalignment between GenAI’s result-oriented paradigm and craft’s process logic. GenAI tends to respond through instant generation and finished-state outputs, hindering temporal incubation, in which ideas and meaning emerge through repeated making, and imperfection transformation, in which errors and material constraints become creative opportunities. Craft practitioners do not simply accept or reject GenAI, but negotiate its role through selective adoption and boundary-setting. We propose a Human–GenAI Co-Creation Framework for Embodied Craft Practice, characterizing how human judgment, material resistance, and GenAI interact in making. This extends GenAI–creativity discourse beyond digital contexts and informs design of systems supporting embodied creation.