Generative AI in creative industries education: a decolonial framework for cultural rights-based EDI curricula

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence tools are increasingly embedded in fashion, design, and creative industries practice, trained predominantly on Western-dominant visual and stylistic repertoires. Building on UN-facing analysis identifying how AI-driven tools can flatten or appropriate non-Western aesthetic traditions, this article asks what these dynamics mean not for industry practice alone but for how creative industries higher education prepares future practitioners to engage critically with such tools. Current EDI frameworks in creative curricula tend to treat representation and cultural rights as compliance add-ons (diversity statements, casting guidelines) that sit alongside, rather than inside, technical and design training. This article argues that the homogenizing tendencies of generative AI make that separation untenable: algorithmic design tools now actively shape whose aesthetic vocabularies are reproduced, learned, and legitimized within the curriculum itself. Rather than an empirical audit, the article advances a conceptual and normative framework. Drawing on critical scholarship on data and algorithmic colonialism, the cultural-rights jurisprudence of the United Nations Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, and documented cases of bias and appropriation in AI-driven fashion, it theorizes how, and at what cost, cultural rights and creative pluralism are reconfigured at the point where generative AI tools enter design education. On this basis, and through the exemplary case of undergraduate fashion design education, it develops a framework for embedding cultural rights and decolonial critique directly within technical AI literacy in creative curricula, rather than treating them as a parallel EDI layer. The argument is situated within a broader structural moment in creative industries higher education internationally, where the rapid institutional adoption of generative AI tools is reshaping technical training itself, creating both risk and opportunity for how cultural pluralism is taught alongside emerging technology.