AI as the New Paint: A Systematic Review of AI as a Design Material

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly influencing creative practice and workflows, with growing research exploring how it can be applied to advance creative work. In parallel, scholars have begun conceptualizing AI as a design material that practitioners can actively shape to support creative goals. This framing, however, remains under-theorized, with limited clarity on which dimensions of AI can be shaped and how. To investigate this potential, we conducted a systematic review of 47 works on AI as a design material and developed a stage-based framework validated against 24 additional works. We propose envisioning AI as the new paint: drawing on the ways traditional paint can be manipulated, we articulate how AI may likewise be crafted and worked with based on its source, processing, formed material, and interpretation. We show how this conceptual vocabulary can be applied to existing tools and offer design implications for reframing AI as design material in practice.