Generative AI Literacy and Multidimensional AI Anxiety in Creative Higher Education

Engagement with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) involves practical literacy as well as learning, professional, sociotechnical, and configuration concerns. This mixed-methods study examined whether these responses were differentiated among Chinese arts-university students. Primary inference used a quality-screened cross-sectional sample of 355 questionnaire records from 351 participant-identifier clusters after excluding 105 of 460 eligible records (22.8%) showing exact whole-battery straightlining across all 59 structured items; the full eligible sample of 460 records from 455 clusters was retained as a sensitivity analysis. GenAI literacy was assessed with a 16-item music-context-adapted self-report instrument covering cognitive (CL), behavioral (BL), affective (AL), and ethical (EL) literacy, and AI Anxiety with 21 items spanning Learning Anxiety (LA), Job-Replacement Anxiety (JR), Sociotechnical Blindness Anxiety (ST), and AI Configuration Anxiety (AC). Of six prespecified associations, only EL-JR and EL-ST met the Holm-adjusted criterion in the primary sample and remained supported in the full-sample and prior-use-adjusted sensitivity analyses. CL-LA and BL-LA were unsupported in both samples, whereas AL-LA and AL-AC were sample-specification sensitive. Measurement models showed mixed fit; CL-BL separation improved after quality screening but remained incomplete. A secondary 47-person exact-identifier matched panel showed higher later-wave CL, BL, and AL scores, whereas EL and all four AI Anxiety dimensions showed no Holm-adjusted difference. These literacy comparisons are exploratory because the administered literacy items were music-framed while the documented learning activities involved broadcasting scripts and AI-supported video production. Independently analyzed qualitative material provided construct-level consistency with the EL-ST interpretation and tentative complementarity for EL-JR, but was not participant-linked to the quantitative samples. Overall, the evidence supports a bounded interpretation of differentiated, calibrated rather than anxiety-free adaptation; it does not establish causal intervention effects or participant-level mixed-method mechanisms.