The Space In-Between: Creative Skill and Cognitive Transitions in the Age of Prompt-Based AI (CHIWORK, Linz 2026)
Kasia Głowicka
The Space In-Between: Creative Skill and Cognitive Transitions in the Age of Prompt-Based AI
Paper presented at the Agency and Skill in Human-AI Interaction workshop, CHIWORK ’26 — the 5th Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work
Summary
Recent neuroscientific evidence is beginning to suggest that prompt-based interaction with large language models reduces brain connectivity and cognitive engagement compared to unaided creative work. For creative practitioners, this is not a peripheral concern — it points to a structural deskilling effect built into how generative AI tools are currently designed.
This paper proposes a practical concept for mitigating that effect: a model of two cognitive modes and three intersections between them, derived from my own compositional practice in algorithmic composition twenty years before generative AI tools became widely available. The framework identifies a single mechanism behind the deskilling effect of prompt-based systems — the elimination of transitions between cognitive modes — and argues that re-introducing those transitions is a teachable, practicable form of resistance.
The argument is grounded historically in Opalescence (2004/5), a piece for three female singers and electronics I composed during my practice-based PhD research at Queen’s University Belfast. At that time, working with algorithmic composition meant something categorically different from what “using AI” means today: there was no prompt field, no conversational layer. To get a system to produce material at all, one had to compose the system itself. Revisiting that practice from a 2026 vantage point makes visible what the prompt-response paradigm has eliminated: the transitions between modes of creative thinking that the cognitive science literature, from Wallas (1926) through to current neuroimaging studies, identifies as the site of creative skill development.
The paper closes with a provocation directed at the creative industry. The same analysis that applies to my own compositional practice applies, with local variation, to advertising, architecture, film, fashion, journalism, design, and the visual arts. What looks today like a productivity gain may, in this reading, be the accelerated obsolescence of an industry’s own workforce. The transition is the skill, and the work now is to make the space between modes inhabitable — in practice, in pedagogy, and eventually in the design of the tools themselves.
Links
Paper (workshop GitHub): Full text HERE
Workshop programme: https://agency-and-skill.github.io
Conference: https://chiwork.org/26/
Citation
Głowicka, K. The Space In-Between: Creative Skill and Cognitive Transitions in the Age of Prompt-Based AI. 5th Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work, Agency and Skill in Human-AI Interaction Workshop, 2026. https://agency-and-skill.github.io/submissions/Glowicka\_2026\_Creative-Skill-and-Cognitive-Transitions-in-the-Age-of-Prompt-Based-AI\_CHIWORK.pdf