Aesthetic Experience and Educational Value in Co-creating Art with Generative AI: Evidence from a Survey of Young Learners
It addresses the educational and aesthetic challenges of human-AI collaboration in arts education for young learners, offering insights into shifting educational values toward critical competencies.
This study investigated how young learners and art students experience and learn from co-creating art with generative AI, finding that participants generally view AI as a stimulating partner that expands creativity but also raise concerns about homogenization and authorship erosion.
This study investigates the aesthetic experience and educational value of collaborative artmaking with generative artificial intelligence (AI) among young learners and art students. Based on a survey of 112 participants, we examine how human creators renegotiate their roles, how conventional notions of originality are challenged, how the creative process is transformed, and how aesthetic judgment is formed in human--AI co-creation. Empirically, participants generally view AI as a partner that stimulates ideation and expands creative boundaries rather than a passive tool, while simultaneously voicing concerns about stylistic homogenization and the erosion of traditional authorship. Theoretically, we synthesize Dewey's aesthetics of experience, Ihde's postphenomenology, and actor--network theory (ANT) into a single analytical framework to unpack the dynamics between human creators and AI as a non-human actant. Findings indicate (i) a fluid subjectivity in which creators shift across multiple stances (director, dialogic partner, discoverer); (ii) an iterative, dialogic workflow (intent--generate--select--refine) that centers critical interpretation; and (iii) an educational value shift from technical skill training toward higher-order competencies such as critical judgment, cross-modal ideation, and reflexivity. We argue that arts education should cultivate a \emph{critical co-creation} stance toward technology, guiding learners to collaborate with AI while preserving human distinctiveness in concept formation, judgment, and meaning-making.