Creative partnerships with generative AI. Possibilities for education and beyond

Abstract

The impact of generative artificial intelligence (AI) on creative production in industry and education is just beginning to be experienced and understood. This impact is likely to accelerate and become even more significant as the computational potential of generative AI grows through training on more diverse and more extensive language models and data sets. Emerging research in this new field suggests that previous models of understanding the interactions between machine and human may no longer be sufficient in a world of generative AI. The significant question is how emerging generative AI technologies will relate to and be a part of human creativity and creative outputs. In this article, we adopt a posthuman stance and conceive of creative output involving generative AI and humans in terms of a yet-to-be-fully-realised and emergent relationship that will likely become more integrated and complex. To investigate and experiment with this relational notion, each of us (as part of an autoethnographic approach) developed a creative output using ChatGPT: a poem and a multimodal narrative. We then employed the idea of alterity relations from the American philosopher of technology, Don Ihde, to conceive of the possibilities and limitations in working relationally and productively with generative AI. As two academics working in teacher education, we applied our learning from this exploration to possibilities in educational contexts. In this article, we offer several important implications and provocations for practitioners, researchers, educators and policymakers, not only in terms of practical concerns but also for rethinking the nature of the creative output.