Co-creating digital art with generative AI in K-9 education: Socio-material insights

The rise of image-generating artificial intelligence (AI) tools has triggered changes in digital art and graphic design, provoking debates in the creative industry. However, scant research exists about children’s and youths’ insights into and encounters with generative AI. Building on sociocultural and new materialist perspectives, this exploratory study proposed to address this gap by exploring middle schoolers’ ( N = 10) creative interaction with generative AI, particularly with text-to-image generative models. Qualitative content analyses of emerging learning activities evidenced how generative AI-formed relations were externalized through novel digital artefacts and collaborative discussions. Ideas evolved through peer collaboration organized around creative making with AI. Teachers facilitated relations between people and technology using dialogic teaching, providing room for unpredictability and critical reflection on the impacts of generative AI, especially authorship and copyright. The study concludes with a discussion of the potential uses of generative AI in future art education research and practice.