AI Tool ClayFlect Lets You Tweak Its 'Hallucinations' for Art
This could change how you use AI for creative projects—and even save you money.
As AI enters reflection and emotional support, understanding how it can participate in personal meaning-making while preserving users' authority over interpretation is increasingly important. We present ClayFlect, a novel MLLM-powered system integrating tactile clay-making with conversational and visual generative AI, and report a mixed-methods study with 50 participants.
Reflection developed across material, conversational, and generated forms rather than through AI interaction alone. Participants treated AI representations as provisional: they compared, redirected, reinterpreted, selectively incorporated, or left them aside as their artefacts and meanings evolved.
Clay provided a directly manipulable space in which participants could continue developing meaning independently of the AI, while generated representations externalised possibilities beyond what they could readily make or visualise. We show how generative AI can participate through representations that remain negotiable, and derive implications for supporting movement across representations, preserving parallel sites of control, and allowing AI support to recede or deepen as reflection unfolds.
- ClayFlect is a new AI tool that lets you use AI 'hallucinations' (mistakes) on purpose for creative projects.
- It's designed for artists and designers who want to explore unusual ideas with AI as a partner.
- The catch: you need to be okay with unpredictable results and guide the AI to get what you want.
Why It Matters
Could make AI more fun and useful for art, design, and brainstorming—if you can handle the unpredictability.