# A Novel Idea Generation Tool using a Structured Conversational AI (CAI) System

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05747 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05747/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 88 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Siren's Song in the AI Ocean: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01219/) (2023)
- [Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11817/) (2024)
- [Cognitive Mirage: A Review of Hallucinations in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06794/) (2023)
- [Generative Transformers for Design Concept Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03468/) (2022)
- [Guiding Data-Driven Design Ideation by Knowledge Distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10104/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [SYNTHIA: Novel Concept Design with Affordance Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17793/) (2025)
- [A Novel Mathematical Framework for Objective Characterization of Ideas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07578/) (2024)
- [Hybrid Reasoning Systems That Prioritize and Enhance Human Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13477/) (2025)
- [Progressive Ideation using an Agentic AI Framework for Human-AI Co-Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00475/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a novel conversational AI-enabled active ideation interface as a creative idea-generation tool to assist novice designers in mitigating the initial latency and ideation bottlenecks that are commonly observed. It is a dynamic, interactive, and contextually responsive approach, actively involving a large language model (LLM) from the domain of natural language processing (NLP) in artificial intelligence (AI) to produce multiple statements of potential ideas for different design problems. Integrating such AI models with ideation creates what we refer to as an Active Ideation scenario, which helps foster continuous dialogue-based interaction, context-sensitive conversation, and prolific idea generation. A pilot study was conducted with thirty novice designers to generate ideas for given problems using traditional methods and the new CAI-based interface. The key parameters of fluency, novelty, and variety were used to compare the outcomes qualitatively by a panel of experts. The findings demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed tool for generating prolific, diverse and novel ideas. The interface was enhanced by incorporating a prompt-engineered structured dialogue style for each ideation stage to make it uniform and more convenient for the designers. The resulting responses of such a structured CAI interface were found to be more succinct and aligned towards the subsequent design stage, namely conceptualization. The paper thus established the rich potential of using Generative AI (Gen-AI) for the early ill-structured phase of the creative product design process.