With just a click and a prompt, artificial intelligence (AI) models can produce high-quality music and imagery as quickly as the average high school student can sharpen a pencil. As these new tools become more widely available, they are raising fundamental questions about the nature of art and its implications for education: what will AI art mean for students, and is there a place for it in the classroom?
Some of the high school’s art and music teachers believe that AI can bring considerable benefits if used thoughtfully, but they caution that it has several inherent limitations that restrict its usefulness. Furthermore, if used to replace rather than supplement creative processes, teachers worry that it could harm artists and erode the essential qualities valued in art.
Digital Music Production and Composition teacher Carolyn Castellano feels that students need to learn to use AI effectively. This semester, she is teaching a unit on the use of AI in music composition in her Digital Music Production course.
“[Students are] going to have to know how to use AI, because it’s not going away. And I think that you can use it in a way to be creative,” Castellano said.
Castellano said that AI can make music composition accessible to a broader range of students, such as those who understand music but have not learned how to play an instrument.
“Maybe some people aren’t great piano players, but they can hear stuff and know it sounds good,” Castellano said. “It enables them to get their ideas across. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”
K-12 curriculum visual arts coordinator Donna Sartanowicz suggested that current students might eventually use AI in their careers as artists. She said that some artists who develop a unique concept or method might increase their productivity by using AI to generate a high volume of art in their distinctive style, in the same way that they would currently employ assistants and apprentices.
Despite its potential benefits, Sartanowicz said that AI will likely not play a substantial role in the visual arts curriculum soon.
“For the most part the work that we do is hands-on. AI is not going to help you to throw a pot or make a sculpture. It’s not going to help you to do a drawing,” Sartanowicz said.
Even teachers who are incorporating AI into the curriculum, like Castellano, said that AI must follow rather than supplant arts education. Based on her experimentation with AI music platforms, Castellano feels that users must already be knowledgeable about music theory and composition to use the tools effectively.
“I think that if you don’t have a strong foundation for hearing what good progressions sound like and how to really manipulate the music, [AI is] not going to help you,” she said.
In fact, Castellano said that if AI is used inappropriately it may impede or undermine music education. During our interview, Castellano demonstrated several AI music platforms, prompting one of them to produce a jazz piece. She then described its shortcomings, including poor harmonic progression and weak harmony, and said that she worries that AI might distort people’s understanding of musical genres and techniques.
“How many people might listen to that and think, ‘oh yeah, it said it was jazz–that must be good?’” Castellano said.
Visual arts teacher Eric Latimer raised the additional concern that AI-generated content is derivative and disconnected from human experience. He acknowledged that AI can be useful in performing grunt work, such as creating lists of research topics or gathering information about techniques. However, he said that he does not use AI for visual tasks and would not consider images he produced with AI to be his art.
“Perhaps there are some people who are satisfied with that, but to me, that doesn’t seem like there’s any engagement, any struggle,” said Latimer. “It’s just like you have to credit the developers who made this. It feels more like a toy. And I think that for myself, anyway, creating artwork is about the struggle, the enjoyment of the process.”
More broadly, Latimer said that while he hopes AI will feed artistic creativity, he worries that it may have the opposite effect.
“I fear that it’s a crutch and that it stops us from developing something that we should keep exercising, and maybe it’s going to have a negative impact on imagination,” Latimer said.
Still, Sartanowicz said that AI is not unlike other new technologies that have spurred artists to change and develop without diminishing their relevance.
“It won’t replace artists, because what artists are doing is so much more than that,” Sartanowicz said. “Artists are the people who, in any society, show us who we are: what we value as a human, as humanity.”
