Christian Guckelsberger

autotelic.scienceAutotelic Interaction Research | Aalto UniversitySupporting self-directed behaviour in AI, people, and in their interaction.

Additional ❗2-y postdoc opportunity❗ to work with the AIR group (www.autotelic.science) and me @aalto.fi on EITHER (1) (computational) intrinsic motivation / unsupervised RL OR (2) creativity x AI, e.g. through a HCI, CogSci or Psych lens. DL: October 4th, 2026 at 11:59 PM (23:59 UTC+03:00)

autotelic.scienceAutotelic Interaction Research | Aalto UniversitySupporting self-directed behaviour in AI, people, and in their interaction.

linkedin.comHIIT: Postdoctoral Fellow positions in Computer Science | HIIT | Christian GuckelsbergerAdditional ❗2-y postdoc opportunity❗ to work with the AIR group (www.autotelic.science) and me at Aalto University next to Helsinki, Finland on EITHER (1) (computational) intrinsic motivation / unsup...

More information: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/... How to apply: bsky.app/profile/icth...

Helsinki Institute for Information Technology@icthiit.bsky.social

#hiring Postdoctoral Fellows to join the Helsinki region IT research community. Deadline for applications October 4 at 11:59 pm Finnish time (UTC+3) More info in the 🔗https://www.hiit.fi/hiit-postdoctoral-fellow-positions-in-computer-science #EarlyCareerResearcher #AcademicSky #postdocposition

autotelic.scienceAutotelic Interaction Research | Aalto UniversitySupporting self-directed behaviour in AI, people, and in their interaction.

The Autotelic Interaction Research Group is part of @aalto.fi @csaalto.bsky.social, a unique hub for world-class research and home of @ellis.eu institute Finland! Next to Helsinki, we're well connected internationally and Finland has been ranked "happiest country on earth" for many years.

1/ When does AI-assisted writing still feel like _your_ writing? How do interaction choices matter? Our new study @aalto.fi @csaalto.bsky.social examines how 2 everyday choices, iterative prompting and direct editing, shape psychological ownership of AI-assisted writing: doi.org/10.1016/j.ch...

5/ Key finding #2: every AI-assisted workflow still produced significantly & substantially lower ownership than writing without AI, even when participants could iteratively prompt and edit. With AI writing tools, one-shot delegation can be particularly harmful when ownership matters.

6/6 Bonus finding: participants who were more intrinsically motivated also felt substantially more ownership over their stories. Exploratorily, the prompting × editing effect was strongest at lower intrinsic motivation and attenuated as intrinsic motivation increased.

3/ Key finding #1 = an interaction: editing strongly increased ownership after single-prompt generation (Δ = 0.89), but much less after iterative prompting (Δ = 0.27). Iterative prompting thus supported psychological ownership mainly when editing was unavailable.

4/ This suggests prompting and editing can provide partially substitutable routes to ownership: both let users invest themselves in and exert control over the text, but at different stages of the writing process. More interaction was not simply additive!

2/ We ran a preregistered experiment (N = 273) in which participants wrote short creative stories either (A) entirely without AI, or with (B) AI using single-prompt vs iterative prompting, crossed with (C) whether they could directly edit the generated text afterwards. We evaluate A+BxC.

2-year postdoc to work on Autotelic Creative AI (ACAI): an opportunity for theoretical research on the foundations of creativity in AI and living beings (e.g. agency, autonomy, value grounding) + time to work on your own ideas fitting with the group's interests. DL: 11.9. bit.ly/4hEpIZz

Critical at its core, the ACAI project seeks to identify alternative and sustainable paths to "mainstream" creative AI. Rather than optimizing systems to replicate established human aesthetics or processes, we investigate the conditions under which AI might operate as a genuinely creative agent.

autotelic.scienceAutotelic Interaction Research | Aalto UniversitySupporting self-directed behaviour in AI, people, and in their interaction.

The Autotelic Interaction Research Group (AIR; www.autotelic.science) is part of @aalto.fi @csaalto.bsky.social, a unique hub of world-class artistic and scientific research and @ellis.eu institute Finland! Picture: Tania Candiani - Subterra (Subterranean), 2025. Helsinki Biennial.

The postdoc will be working in close interaction with a media artist, the PI and the wider AIR group. They will also be invited to work with and travel to our fantastic world-leading collaborators Tom Froese (OIST), Takashi Ikegami (University of Tokyo), and Jon McCormack (Monash University)!

3 Aug

(1/3) Join us in discussing AI's impact on how digital games can be designed, produced, experienced, and studied! Applications to our hybrid CHIPLAY26 workshop "Envisioning and Co-Creating GenAI for Future Creative Workers in Gaming" now open / DL Sep 21, 2026! sites.google.com/view/chiplay...

3 Aug

(2/3) In this interactive workshop, we invite you to build a community and a proactive approach to collectively reflect on and envision GenAI’s evolving role in shaping the future of creative work in gaming. Please submit a position statement and bio (max 200 w each): forms.gle/rmh99ajU5kUL...

lnkd.inLinkedInThis link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

3 Aug

(3/3) A half-day, hybrid event at CHIPLAY26 in York, UK / Mon Nov 2nd, 2026. Co-organizers: Guo Freeman @guofreeman.bsky.social, Carlos Toxtli @carlostoxtli.bsky.social, Ruchi Panchanadikar, Yang Hu, Julian Frommel, Regan Mandryk @reganmandryk.bsky.social and Alena Denisova @sevenfridays.bsky.social

12 Apr

Are you a junior researcher (Master's+) working on #computationalcreativity? I'm organising the Early Career Symposium (ECS) at ICCC2016 - join us to present and discuss your projects and career questions. DL for extended abstract: May 15th. More info: computationalcreativity.net/iccc26/early...

programs.sigchi.orgConference Programs

12 Apr

Interested in interpretative qualitative research synthesis as a methodology for HCI research or in GenAI's impact on game development specifically? Seek me out at #chi2026 / presentation Tue morning: programs.sigchi.org/chi/2026/pro...

Christian Guckelsberger@creativeendvs.bsky.social

(1/) Accepted to CHI’26: 1st qualitative research synthesis on the impact of GenAI - here on game development (2020-25). Core contributions: meta-ethnography integrating 10 studies -> 9 themes + industry context + recommendations for practice, research & governance. doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.11898

24 Mar

Interested in applying? Now is the time! DL: Fri 3.4.2026. The job ads have now been updated with a Q&A section, collecting many questions that I've received thus far.

Christian Guckelsberger@creativeendvs.bsky.social

Jobs! The Autotelic Interaction Research Group is looking for (1) creative practitioners and (2) theory researchers to work on "Autotelic Creative Artificial Intelligence" (ACAI): (1) PhD in Creative Practices (2+2 years): lnkd.in/dPBG47rM (2) Postdoctoral Researcher (2 years): lnkd.in/dMisM_bf

(7/) We contextualise the adoption of GenAI within larger trends in game industry & provide rigorous methodological detail and reflexivity on meta-ethnography as a yet underexplored method in HCI.

(8/8) Fantastic collaboration with @axternar.bsky.social @aakoo.bsky.social @sevenfridays.bsky.social @jmacunha.bsky.social at universities @aalto.fi @ucoimbra.bsky.social @york.ac.uk . Meet us at CHI!

(5/) What makes adoption fragile: risks around originality, ownership, labour precarity & need for provenance to be embedded in workflows. We argue governance is not an optional overhead; GenAI reshapes authorship and can drive stylistic convergence if left unchecked.

(6/) NB: our findings derive from studies scattered over time -> must not be understood as a snapshot of the present. We recommend using them, combined w the identified research gaps, to guide up-to-date research within the specific context of interest for advancing policy or practice.

(3/) Existing qualitative studies suggest that GenAI’s strongest value is upstream: ideation and exploratory prototyping, not end-to-end authorship. Across studies, the shared conclusion is that systems broaden option spaces but humans still frame, judge, and steer what becomes “the work”.

(4/) Efficiency claims are contested & conditional: speed-ups are task-/phase-dependent, and often eroded by configuration, verification, and integration overhead. Pipeline fit is real bottleneck: current tools rarely fit production requirements w/o adapters, acceptance criteria & evaluation gates.

(2/) A consistent finding across the corpus is that human-in-the-loop refinement is the production norm. Generative outputs behave like provisional artefacts: teams iterate, curate, correct, and integrate, and prompting becomes progressive specification work rather than a one-shot query.

A fantastic opportunity to join a creative, open-minded research group just outside Helsinki in the happiest country on earth + to work with fantastic researchers worldwide, e.g. collaborators Tom Froese (OIST), @jon-mcc.bsky.social (Monash University) & Takashi Ikegami (University of Tokyo).

(1/) Does visualizing an AI’s image generation process make people judge it as more “creative”? Our ACM IUI'26 paper shows that the "who" of the observer can matter more than what the interface reveals. Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

(5/) Further analyses in paper + qualitative comments highlight many differences in how the process was perceived. Design implication: process visualizations are not a universal “creativity boost” button. They can backfire for some audiences unless paired with context or adapted to user background.

(6/6) A collaboration with Niki Pennanen and @robinwelsch.bsky.social, complementing our prior work on robots here: dl.acm.org/doi/full/10..... Supported by The Finnish Doctoral Program Network in Artificial Intelligence (AI-DOC) & Research Council of Finland (371202). @aalto.fi @csaalto.bsky.social

(3/) Prolific participants were UK census-representative (N=298+295). The headline Study 1 result: process visibility did NOT increase perceived creativity on average. Study 2 sought to “help” the process animation by adding a tutorial on diffusion: still no tutorial/PE/interaction effects!

(4/) The story gets interesting with individual differences: Amongst others, AI literacy moderated the effect with lower literacy -> process tended to lower creativity ratings; higher literacy -> process tended to raise them.

(2/) We studied this in two preregistered online studies with text-to-image outputs (Stable Diffusion), manipulating Perceptual Evidence (PE): Product (final image only) vs Product+Process (30s denoising animation, then the final image).

1/5 Now in Artificial Life: our research on the creativity of unsupervised learning! Core finding: a simple model of attractor networks with Hebbian learning is sufficient to constitute a (minimal) creative process, yielding creative products as solutions of the optimization. doi.org/10.1162/ARTL...

4/5 This work contributes to a young research agenda seeking to understand creativity beyond the realm of humans or highly developed animals. We argue for the SO model as a fascinating candidate to study the effect of learning on creativity from the bottom up - in life as it is and as it could be.

5/5 Collaboration between @aalto.fi and @oistedu.bsky.social, supported by Aalto Science Institute (ASci) and the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT).

2/5 Developed to model complex adaptive systems in ALife and advocated as a candidate for minimal agency, the Self-Optimization (SO) model can be considered as the 3rd operational mode of the classical Hopfield Network, leveraging the power of associative memory to enhance optimization performance.

fcai.fiEthics is not a 15-minute box-ticking exercise — FCAIResponsible AI development requires continuous, critical ethical thinking from everyone involved in creating technology.

3/5 More specifically, we demonstrate that modifying the SO model learning parameters gives rise to four different regimes that can account for both creative products and inconclusive outcomes, thus providing a framework for studying and understanding the creative potential of learning systems.

Christian Guckelsberger reposted

Karoliina Snell

@ksnell.bsky.social

17 June 2025

Read the blog of the Ethics Advisory Board of Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence about the need to incorporate training and discussions in AI ethics in the AI-related doctoral student's curriculum. fcai.fi/eab-blog/eth... Written together with colleagues listed in the comments.

bit.lyDoctoral Researcher and Postdoc positions to work on Computational Social Intrinsic Motivation (SIM) | Aalto UniversityThe Autotelic Interaction Research (AIR) group at the Dept. of Computer Science, Aalto University, Finland is looking for 1 Doctoral Researcher (2+2 years) and 1 Postdoc (2 years) to work on Computational Social Intrinsic Motivation (SIM)

1/4 Join us and the Autotelic Interaction Research (AIR) group @aalto.fi / Finland to work on Computational Social Intrinsic Motivation (SIM) as PhD (4y) or postdoc (2y). Job ad w project description and application instructions: bit.ly/4jyNLGv. We're looking forward to learning about you!

3/4 You can work w/travel to our fantastic collaborators Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social (Washington U./DeepMind), Sebastian Deterding @codingconduct.cc (Imperial College), Christoph Salge @christophsalge.bsky.social & Daniel Polani (UH), & Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social (NYU)!

4/4 Locally, we're part of a rich AI research ecosystem, including the Finnish Center of AI (FCAI), Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) @icthiit.bsky.social and the Finnish @ellis.eu institute, a world-class research hub in AI and machine learning.