Although no one can predict what the art of the future will look like, it seems increasingly clear that at least some of it will be created with the help of artificial intelligence. A growing number of visual arts programs at private art colleges and universities now offer courses—and in some cases, full degree programs—that focus on advanced technology. These include the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita, the Cleveland Institute of Art & Design in Ohio, the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design at Indiana University in Bloomington, the Parsons School of Design in Manhattan, the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. Students who graduate from these and similar programs are less likely to abandon what they have learned once they leave school.
What are they really taught? Rick Dakan, chairman of the Emerging Technologies Committee at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, described artists who create “digital images with a complex workflow that incorporates AI tools into their multi-step process. 1980s—”then take that image and use an AI tool to do a three-dimensional rendering of it and print the model with a 3-D printer.”
Caleb Weintraub, director of the Eskenazi Technology and Innovation Lab in the School of Art, Architecture + Design at Indiana University, described one of his creations, a project called “Speculative Portraiture,” in which “the voice becomes an image. The finished works are hand-painted images on panels, not prints or screen outputs.” He works with AI-generated voices—sometimes his own or those of willing colleagues and family members—to test what images of the human head are produced when various features of the voice are fed into the AI system. “I then made a series of gestural drawings using the photographs as references, as if I were meeting the same person at different times.”
Tom Leeser, founding director of the Art and Technology Program and director of the Center for Integrated Media at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), described the first artistic use of AI as “making images by being told, asking a system to produce something based on a question. The next steps, however, can be very technical. Scott Benzel, a faculty member in the CalArts program in Art and Technology, recalled a 2017 piece he created, Mathematics and Mathematicsof a string quartet, dancers and a telescope operator. “The score was composed using early production AI, including Noatikl and the Wolframtones and was based on Hubble’s Constant, the law of universal expansion that Edwin Hubble discovered using the telescope at Mt. Wilson in 1929. Other elements of the piece, including the movement of the telescope’s dome and the ‘dancing, cut-off’ techniques chose the same elements of the dance. I edited the produced result into something that I found pleasing and the result was it was too complicated, it could not be played by humans and had to be simplified by the scorer and the players.
While the process may sound playful, these and other professors emphasize that AI is a tool—not an end product. “Results produced by AI programs alone are rarely considered a finished work,” Weintraub said, adding that “legal and ethical questions—authorship, ownership, availability of data—are part of a broader critical discussion in studies that interact with AI tools.”
Ry Fryar, an assistant professor of art at York College in Pennsylvania, explained that his courses in Digital Art and Big AI teach students to use AI tools as part of the big creative process. “The focus is on the design itself, because otherwise, the results are common, therefore dull and unprofessional. We work with students on how to guide AI tools to a professional level, we keep up with developing best practices and understand current copyright law, ethics and other standards for using AI properly.”
Artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI—which generates text, videos, images and other types of data—has been a source of both fascination and concern in recent years. On the side of concern, high school and university faculty in the humanities are struggling to find out whether written assignments were completed by students or by ChatGPT or another AI generating program. Existing detection tools are unreliable, and teachers are hesitant to accuse students of misbehavior without hard evidence. Jessica Sponsler, an assistant professor of art history at York College of Pennsylvania, noted that “I’m a medievalist. I can read Latin,” but added, “I work, we’re all dealing with AI. We’re in the middle of a transition, and many faculty here agree that students are using ChatGPT. Our job is to help those who use ChatGPT to improve their skills and help them improve their skills to improve their skills. skills.”
Andrew Shea, director of the School of Design at Parsons School of Design, said the college doesn’t teach students to code or create a “big language model,” or “push a button and get an answer.” Instead, “It’s about teaching them how to think about when to use AI, why and how, if they need it at all. When they use it, students are expected to learn how to use it intentionally, think about its impact on their system, and keep their voice and opinion at the center. I tell them that AI is like a spice—it can add complexity or change flavor, but it makes developers try better. Using too much AI tends to limit both of these things from happening.”
Outside of education, the concern goes further. Will all employment sectors be replaced by AI? Generative AI is already a source of companionship for young and old singles, sometimes with troubling consequences. Lawsuits by Getty Images and several artists against Stable AI (creator of Stable Diffusion), Midjourney and DeviantART (creator of DreamUp), alleging copyright infringement, have been going through the courts for years. Meanwhile, the US copyright office continues to fight whether artwork created using AI is eligible for copyright protection, as only works created by humans are eligible.
Basil Masri Zada, assistant professor of digital arts and technology and head of the Center for Advanced Computing in the School of Art + Design at Ohio University, said that convincing faculty, administrators and legal advisors that they were not encouraging cheating or risking legal exposure “took us a year to make sure we were doing things the right way.
While colleges and universities in the US seem to be embracing AI in studio art courses, not everyone is on board. The University of New South Wales in Australia launched a course this fall in its School of Art and Design titled “Generative AI for Artists,” which led to a petition signed by more than 7,000 students calling for it to be canceled. “Our main argument is that the course encourages and requires students to use generative AI to create art,” said Robin, a fourth-year student in the university’s fine arts degree program who asked that her last name not be used. “As detailed in the petition, there are many ethical, environmental and humanitarian issues with the use of artificial intelligence, and we do not believe it is appropriate for the university to promote it.”
He called the idea that AI is the inevitable future “defeated,” adding, “we’ve seen how campaigns and laws related to technology, especially in the EU, have worked to protect people and the environment. Why should we give up on generative AI? We don’t need to stop before we start.” A university spokesperson defended the course, noting that it “critically explores the creative and ethical questions raised by AI, rather than simply promoting or celebrating its use.”
Whether to teach AI and how to teach it remains a debate among academics—perhaps more about how than if. Andrew Shea said, “the deep issue is ownership. And this is what we focus on at Parsons and our students: Do you own your process? Do you decide what to keep, what to reject and what definition you need? Or do you simply give all of that to programs built on the unpaid work of many others?”
Will AI in art endure, or is it just a fad? Fifty years ago, art students often entered school wanting to be painters or sculptors but switched to film and video. Twenty years ago, they turned to social behavior. Now, courses and degrees in artificial intelligence are redefining creative education—shaping students’ thinking and providing seemingly new career paths.
In recent years, university studio art programs—and especially private art colleges—have expanded their offerings in all directions. The Savannah College of Art and Design, for example, has degree programs in Equestrian Studies and the Business of Beauty and Fragrance. The Maryland Institute College of Art allows students to minor in cartooning. Ringling College of Art and Design offers undergraduate degrees in the Business of Art and Design and CalArts offers degrees in Aesthetics and Politics. The Rhode Island School of Design also launched its first body painting course, which could one day lead to a full program. Perhaps the proliferation of AI courses in art schools is just part of higher education’s version of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on October 13, 2025.
More on AI in art
