An Exploratory Study on the Direction of Art Education in the Era of Generative AI: Focusing on the Discourse of Contemporary AI Art

Abstract

This study seeks to articulate a direction for art education in the age of generative AI, drawing on the critical discourse that has emerged around contemporary AI art. Discussions of generative AI in school art education have largely remained confined to questions of instrumental use; against this backdrop, the present study rereads the critical discourse being formed within contemporary art through the lens of art education. To this end, it first examines the shifts that generative artificial intelligence is bringing to visual art practice, along with how such shifts have been taken up in the discourse of art education. It then turns to the works of Refik Anadol, Holly Herndon, and Trevor Paglen, showing that each artist intervenes at a distinct layer of the process through which AI images come into being. Read together, these works suggest that AI‑generated images must be thought of across three intertwined layers—material, process, and language. The study reorganizes this insight as three dimensions of critical inquiry: the constructedness of data, the relationality of the generative process, and the normativity of classificatory language. Building on the tradition of critical visual literacy in visual culture art education, it ultimately reframes these dimensions as a three‑dimensional literacy addressing the data foundation, the generative network, and the systems of classification that shape AI imagery.