Protosampling: Enabling Free-Form Convergence of Sampling and Prototyping through Canvas-Driven Visual AI Generation

TL;DR

This work defines protosampling as the convergence of sampling and prototyping in AI-driven visual creation and introduces Atelier, a canvas-style system that co-locates source materials and generated media within activity-centered easels. By encapsulating workflows, providing rich provenance, and enabling flexible organization, Atelier supports open-ended, iterative exploration that blends thinking and making. The study demonstrates, through design rationale, implementation details, and an extended first-use study with professionals, that protosampling enables more controllable, expressive, and ownership-oriented creative workflows compared to purely prompt-based or node-based tools. The approach offers practical implications for crafting AI-assisted workflows, highlighting local-model pipelines, multi-modal canvases, and structured sensemaking as a path toward scalable, ethical, and collaborative AI-enabled creativity.

Abstract

As an emergent process, creativity relies on explorations via sampling and prototyping for problem construction. These activities compile knowledge, provide a context enveloping the solution, and answer questions. With Generative AI, practitioners can go beyond sampling existing media towards instantly generating and remixing new ones. We refer to this convergence as 'protosampling'. Using existing literature we ground a definition for protosampling and operationalize it through Atelier, a canvas-like system that leverages a variety of generative image and video models for visual creation. Atelier: (1) blends the spaces for thinking and creation, where both references and generated assets co-exist in one space, (2) provides various encapsulated technical workflows that focus on the activity at hand, and (3) enables navigating emergence through interactive visualizations, smart search, and collections. Protosampling as a lens reframes creative work to emphasize the process itself and how seemingly disjointed thoughts can tightly interweave into a final solution.

Figures (15)

• Figure 1: Overview of the creative process according to Sawyer sawyer2024explaining, situating sampling, prototyping and proposing Protosampling as the bridge between these two activities.
• Figure 2: Procedural actions within Protosampling, these include (a) derivations, in which concept properties are changed; (b) combinations, in which two concepts are brought together; and (c) adaptation, in which concepts are transferred from other guiding principles.
• Figure 3: Quick operations. Images in Atelier present common functions for image processing. Illustrated examples include: revision, which allows making edits to the image; process, which analyzes the image, generates ControlNet preprocessors and captions it; and remove background.
• Figure 4: The Collage easel allows composing images into a new image. This example one character extracted from a background and brought into a new scene.
• Figure 5: Description of the Paint easel showing how one might add reference images, a starting image and a structure image. The reference image box allows setting the strength and also opening a mask editor to determine the area of influence for that particular reference.