Surveying Impacts of AI in Education and Creative Practices

Fields as diverse as art, photography, writing, and design are now confronting the consequences of easily available—and easy to use—generative systems. Text and image products that used to be understood as direct expressions of the minds of a human creator may now be generated synthetically through software and neural networks. The emergence of such ‘smart’ software poses novel ethical challenges for the evaluation of intellectual products like images and text. There has been a predictable backlash against incursions of automation and generative systems into creative practices that have evolved over centuries. The author surveys critical perspectives on these software systems as they relate to creative practices, and cites examples of how tools and services made possible by neural networks have caused controversy. Further, based on history and trends in mainstream digital culture, the author concludes that popular notions of authorship and creativity will continue to evolve as machine learning and artificial intelligence become increasingly entwined in production tools.