Knowledge Engagement in Art and Design Education: About the Role of AI in Creativity Education

This chapter outlines some of the possibilities offered by recent developments in artificial intelligence in modelling and supporting creativity in educational environments. It investigates the issues concerning the integration of Large Language Models into the creative process, by exploiting AI’s linguistic and knowledge-based skills. The proposed approach envisages a mediated interaction with a semantic space constructed from an extensive catalogue of artistic and critical content. The investigation outlines how the use of AI in the creative cycle can trigger divergent forms of conceptualization, and how these appear as divergent paths in the semantic space. This opens the possibility to qualify the creative process through the traces produced by the interaction with the AI. Since many of the parameters that are relevant in the experimental setting, such as the nature and the arrangement of the knowledge base, the arrangement of the tasks, the conversational traces, and the related semantic paths are, to our knowledge, novel in this form to the scientific investigation, the preliminary results reported here concern mainly the outline of the methodological framework through preliminary experimental results. Furthermore, the research is limited to conceptual processes, neglecting other fundamental domains such as perceptual and kinesthetic processes, as well as social aspects.