The majority of talks I attended at the recent CHEAD/UAL ‘AI in Art and Design Education’ were from academics discussing how they, and their students, have been incorporating AI into their creative processes. Many of the examples demonstrated how students are using image-based AI platforms to generate concepts and designs as part of building a portfolio response to a creative brief.

The attitude towards AI seems to have shifted from a defensive ‘it’s not very good at X or Y’ to more of a ‘it needs to get better at X and Y so it’s more useable’. I think this shift is because there is less fear that AI will consume entire subjects, and more confidence in incorporating as part of a larger workflows or processes.

Only one session I attended (apart from mine), a talk by James Dalby, was still exploring how AI functions and what the implications/limits of this might be. Whereas for most teaching staff there is an ‘it’s everywhere now’ effect. Students are using it because it’s available so we have to make sense of what it means ‘in practice’. Under these circumstances, how it works is less important than what it can, and cannot, do.

There was discussion about anxiety amongst students as to the ethics of using AI and the impact it might have on their prospects. One academic who simply said, ‘you need to run through the ethics first or students get quite anxious/angry’.

What I saw in the many examples of student work shown was a new form of context collapse. One in which the relationships between practice, medium and subject start to breakdown.

‘Classic’ Context Collapse

When the web started to become mainstream the fact that ‘anyone could publish’ created a frisson of excitement (crowd sourcing, the wisdom of the crowd etc.) and/or a sense of panic. Which side of this line you were usually depended on how much of your power was conferred on you by established knowledge institutions or The Fourth Estate.  

Assessing the validity and quality of information by checking which institution it was produced by fell away. Suddenly we had Wikipedia, which could be contributed to by anyone *shocked face*. We had individuals finding massive reach and influence without first having to gain power through institutional hierarchies with all their checks, balances and positioning (some might say biases).

In addition to this, the crisp boundary between the notion of ‘published work’ and ‘just saying stuff’ stared to get blurry. Yes, citation styles for blogposts and Tweets were invented, but what was the relative weight, or truth, of these media?

I must admit that I loved the period where longstanding, gatekeeping, institutions started to lose their monopoly on the flow of information but before things got truly toxic. We didn’t need to kick down the gates, we could simple go around them, and as someone who was suspicious of the hierarchies of academia, I was happy to use the web to get my ideas out there and to find a welcoming international community to be part of.

This was around the time social media was emerging but before it had become a finely honed attention machine. Manipulating behaviour via the algorithm was not so prevalent and the environment was yet to become dangerously polarised.

Classic collapse and education

For education, all of this was a headache. Knowledge was suddenly abundant and eminently copy-and-paste-able. Curriculum routed in the idea that information seeking is hard-work and has predictable frameworks for assessing quality and validity began to feel creaky. Pupils and students were bamboozled by edicts not to use Wikipedia, when they could see for themselves that the quality was as high, if not higher, than the dusty textbooks that were lauded as solid and reliable.

The link between the inherent quality of information and classic information literacy snapped. The context of production and the genre of the media was still important. If it was produced by the BBC or by a reputable university then it was probably solid, but there was a bunch of other choices now and some of them looked pretty good. There was also the problem that almost everything that was claimed to be ‘reliable’ demanded payment. The utopia of the web suggested that ‘information should be free’ which made the established institutions look like walled gardens (I was working at one which had gardens with walls round them at the time…).

Effects of the collapse

The classic collapse is still in full force and has led to the relativism of post-truth and alternative facts. Breaking the link between authenticity and ‘trusted’ institutions created a complex information environment which was difficult to navigate. Populist voices appeared with simple narratives that papered over complexity and assured the anxious there is a nobility in a narrow worldview.

In effect, we didn’t have the capability to expand our thinking and fell back into the certainty of difference over the nuances of plurality. ‘Progress’ was now presented as a return to simpler times and protecting one’s own. Technologies which had made complexity and richness of voices visible were retooled to maximise attention by playing to the comfort of prejudice, which includes the righteousness of outrage. The popularists are adeptly using the technologies which revealed a complex world to target their simplest messages.

The new collapse and education

The new collapse amplifies uncertainty by removing more of the anchors by which we have historically understood our world. Our educational notions of subject and practice are being eroded by technologies which can transmute media and genre. Now text can be audio, can be video, can be image. This is significant because our frameworks of understanding and evaluating are based on there being clear boundaries between mediums and genres.

A photograph is produced by a camera, a radio programme is produced by speaking, a written text is produced through the practice of writing etc. Everything is now simply data to be manipulated into a human-readable output, everything can be everything else. This is a realisation of Haraway’s thinking on data as a universal and dehumanising language. Now that none of these human-centric distinctions hold, our models of ‘subject’ become fragile.

In this new context collapse we lose form, practice and genre as epistemological co-ordinates for sense-making. When everything can be everything else without requiring significant practice-based skill to make those translations, form becomes mercurial and our systems of evaluation begin to feel arbitrary.

This is not necessarily felt at the point of production but given that almost all cultural production is now mediated through a screen this ‘form slidey-ness’ makes the work of interpretation challenging. Historically our institutions and the genre of production/communication have been our makers of authenticity. Add the old and the new collapse together and it becomes difficult to get a foothold via subject, genre or literacies. This is not to say that we now all make our own truth, but rather that we must find new approaches to negotiating collective understanding which don’t rely heavily on pre-collapse literacies.

Context collapses and Creative Education

I presented The AI Learning Gambit at the CHEAD/UAL event. One of the comments in text chat was ‘Creative Education is broad, and AI will impact subjects unevenly. Fine Art will probably be ok but Graphic Design might have a hard time’ (I’m paraphrasing).

My view is that the character and focus of subjects will shift (as they always have done) and some will be forced to change more than others. There will always be a need for individuals who have mastered a specific practice, but context collapse will reduce the numbers required (while also raising the status of these specialists). On the other hand, there will be an increased need for Design and Fine Art ways of working. By which I mean the ability to read the world, think critically and develop/assess ideas. Critical thinking and the production of new knowledge cannot be industrialised by any technology.

Design and Fine Art approaches become every more crucial

In their purest form, Design and Fine Art are based on producing new knowledge and developing new ways of seeing. Practice, style, media and technique are vehicles for something larger, rather than being the end in-of-itself. (Here I’m thinking of Fine Art in its more recent led-by-concept form rather than the traditional atelier, here-is-the-right-way-to-paint approach.)

Attempting to define Design and Fine Art is a risky business as any categorisation feels like drawing lines through blurry spaces. Even so, its worth mapping some of these out.

	Design	Fine Art
Impetuous	New knowledge	New ways of seeing
Driver	Extrinsic	Intrinsic
Approach	Innovation	Questioning
Direction	Convergent	Divergent
Identity	Brand	Artist
Grouping	Teams	Individual
Positioning	Objective	Subjective
Methods	Shared	Personal

It’s useful to see these a broad trends rather than distinctions, as it’s easy to think of examples where one, or many, of these are switched. For example, there are many Fine Art collectives (‘groups’) and many individual designers operate as brands (‘artists’). The interchangeability of these categories within Design and Fine Art exists because they are both underpinned by intentionality and agency. Strong work produced by both goes beyond imitation. At UAL many of our Design courses are underpinned by a Fine Art philosophy and Design-as-a-method is often used in our Fine Art courses.

I’m not suggesting all Creative Arts education should be Design or Fine Art courses, I’m suggesting that it would benefit our students if this philosophy and approach underpinned most of what we do. (and I think it does for the most part)

What is crucial for an increasing majority of our students is to be equipped with ability to develop new knowledge and new ways of seeing. These have the most robust currency in a screen mediated, context collapsed world, while the practices required to realise, or express, thinking and seeing remain important but secondary (again, to be clear – for most, not all).

In many ways I’m simply describing a well put together creative arts course. Valid responses to subject benchmarks and our UAL assessment criteria will incorporate reflective, critical and analytical approaches. As students move through any course/learning journey they should be developing their own position relative to subject, ethics and methods of production (labour). There should be a shift in emphasis from developing practice-based skills to using those practices in the service of their thinking.

In short, context collapse and emerging technologies don’t demand a radical change of direction for creative education, they demand we operate with integrity and confidence. As a general principle ‘doing less, better’ as a way of responding to the complexity of the collapses would be sensible. (i.e. don’t use technology to make a system which is already overstuffed ‘more efficient’ – deal with the root cause and give people more time to think.)